uarium
mania, must have become familiar, even to the limits of boredom. In
1710, the great naturalist, Reaumur,[115] had written a memoir for the
express purpose of demonstrating that these "orties" are animals; and
with this important paper Peyssonel must necessarily have been familiar.
Therefore, when he declared the "flowers" of the red coral to be little
"orties," it was the same thing as saying that they were animals of the
same general nature as sea-anemones. But to Peyssonel's contemporaries
this was an extremely startling announcement. It was hard to imagine the
existence of such a thing as an association of animals into a structure
with stem and branches altogether like a plant, and fixed to the soil
as a plant is fixed; and the naturalists of that day preferred not to
imagine it. Even Reaumur could not bring himself to accept the notion,
and France being blessed with Academicians, whose great function (as the
late Bishop Wilson [116] and an eminent modern writer [117] have so well
shown) is to cause sweetness and light to prevail, and to prevent such
unmannerly fellows as Peyssonel from blurting out unedifying truths,
they suppressed him; and, as aforesaid, his great work remained in
manuscript, and may at this day be consulted by the curious in that
state, in the Bibliotheque du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. Peyssonel,
who evidently was a person of savage and untameable disposition, so far
from appreciating the kindness of the Academicians in giving him time to
reflect upon the unreasonableness, not to say rudeness, of making public
statements in opposition to the views of some of the most distinguished
of their body, seems bitterly to have resented the treatment he met
with. For he sent all further communications to the Royal Society of
London, which never had, and it is to be hoped never will have,
anything of an academic constitution; and finally he took himself off to
Guadaloupe, and became lost to science altogether.

Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's suppressed paper,
the Abbe Trembley [118] published his wonderful researches upon the
fresh-water Hydra. Bernard de Jussieu [119] and Guettard [120] followed
them up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines;
Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peyssonel's
views, adopted them, and made him a half-and-half apology in the preface
to the next published volume of the "Memoires pour servir l'Histoir