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 [113] 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 ayant mis le vase plein d’eau ou le corail etait a une douce chaleur aupres du feu, tous les petits insectes s’epanouirent.—­L’Ortie sortie etend les pieds, et forme ce que M. de Marsigli et moi avions pris pour les petales de la fleur.  Le calice de cette pretendue fleur est le corps meme de l’animal avance et sorti hors de la cellule."[114]

     * This extract from Peyssonel’s manuscript is given by M.
     Lacaze Duthiers in his valuable Histoire Naturelle du Corail
     (1866).

The comparison of the flowers of the coral to a “petite ortie,” or “little nettle,” is perfectly just, but needs explanation.  “Ortie de mer,” or “sea-nettle,” is, in fact, the French appellation for our “sea-anemone,” a creature with which everybody, since the great aquarium mania, must have become familiar, even to the limits of boredom.  In 1710, the great naturalist, Reaumur,[115]