mollis fuit herba sub undis,"

says Ovid (Metam. xv.); and it was not until the seventeenth century
that Boccone was emboldened, by personal experience of the facts, to
declare that the holders of this belief were no better than "idiots,"
who had been misled by the softness of the outer coat of the living
red coral to imagine that it was soft all through.

Messer Boccone's strong epithet is probably undeserved, as the
notion he controverts, in all likelihood, arose merely from the
misinterpretation of the strictly true statement which any coral
fisherman would make to a curious inquirer; namely, that the outside
coat of the red coral is quite soft when it is taken out of the sea.
At any rate, he did good service by eliminating this much error from
the current notions about coral. But the belief that corals are plants
remained, not only in the popular, but in the scientific mind; and
it received what appeared to be a striking confirmation from the
researches of Marsigli in 1706. For this naturalist, having the
opportunity of observing freshly-taken red coral, saw that its
branches were beset with what looked like delicate and beautiful
flowers, each having eight petals. It was true that these "flowers"
could protrude and retract themselves, but their motions were hardly
more extensive, or more varied, than those of the leaves of the
sensitive plant; and therefore they could not be held to militate
against the conclusion so strongly suggested by their form and their
grouping upon the branches of a tree-like structure.

Twenty years later, a pupil of Marsigli, the young Marseilles
physician, Peyssonel, conceived the desire to study these singular
sea-plants, and was sent by the French Government on a mission to the
Mediterranean for that purpose. The pupil undertook the investigation
full of confidence in the ideas of his master, but being able to see
and think for himself, he soon discovered that those ideas by no means
altogether corresponded with reality. In an essay entitled "Traite du
Corail," which was communicated to the French Academy of Science, but
which has never been published, Peyssonel writes:--

"Je fis fleurir le corail dans des vases pleins d'eau de mer,
et j'observai que ce que nous croyons etre la fleur de cette
pretendue plante n'etait au vrai, qu'un insecte semblable a
une petite Ortie ou Poulpe. J'avais le plaisir de voir remuer
les pattes, ou pieds, de cette Ortie, et ayan