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
Réaumur could not bring himself to accept the notion, and France being
blessed with Academicians, whose great function (as the late Bishop
Wilson and an eminent modern writer 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
"Bibliothèque du Muséum 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 took
himself off to Guadaloupe, and became lost to science altogether.

Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's suppressed
paper, the Abbé Trembley published his wonderful researches upon the
fresh-water _Hydra_. Bernard de Jussieu and Guettard followed them
up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines;
Réaumur, 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 "Mémoires pour
servir à l'Histoire des Insectes;" and, from this time forth,