166 Mr. A. H. HassaH's Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. XXI. — Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. By Arthur Hill Hassall, Esq., M.R.C.S.L. With 3 Plates. te It is delightful to see by these miniature existences, small almost to invisibility, and by their careful organization as finely contrived as in the grandest creature, that greatness and littleness make no difference to Him in His Creation or in His Providence. They reveal to us that magnitude is nothing in His sight ; that He is pleased to frame and to regard the small and weak as benignly and as attentively as the mighty and the massive. We are high and low, great and small, as to each other, but not to Him." — Sharon Turner's Sacred History. In no part of the animal kingdom is the truth of the above remarks more pleasingly or more beautifully manifested than in the present order ; in no other department do we meet with, to an equal extent at least, the same diversity and elegance of form so illustrative of the fertility of invention and beauty of conception of the Divine Mind. The heart must be cold and insensate indeed, that, on beholding these interesting " minims of creation" is not tempted to exclaim with the Psalmist, "in wisdom," beneficent, infinite wisdom, " hast thou made them all." The whole of the zoophytes enumerated in the following Catalogue, with two exceptions, were found in the bays of Dublin and Killiney during the winter of 1838 and spring of 1839. The extent of coast embraced by these bays is about sixteen miles, abounding more in marine productions than any other known locality of similar dimensions. The distribution of zoophytes is often extremely local, in many cases a species being restricted to one particular spot of perhaps not more than half a mile or a mile in extent ; it is, on this account, that I have given the habitat of each sepa-rately. The law of the spiral development of similar parts, so evi-dent in the vegetable kingdom, is here also very generally ma-nifested both in the form of the polypes as well as in that of the polypidoms — this is particularly remarkable in Antennu-laria antennina, Thuiaria thuja, Campanularia verticellata, and Vesicularia spinosa ; and traces of this arrangement may be detected in some part or other of the structure of the ma-jority of zoophytes. In this catalogue the term Zoophyte is used in the ex-tended signification in which it was employed by Ellis, who embraced in his work the Articulated Corallines and Sponges, denying, however, the existence of polypes in the latter, and
BioStor
