A history of the British sea-anemones and corals / by Philip Henry Gosse.

  • Gosse, Philip Henry, 1810-1888.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of the British sea-anemones and corals / by Philip Henry Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE. In writing the following pages, I hare laboured to produce such a History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals, as a student can work with. Having often painfully felt in studying works similar to the present, the evil of the vagueness and con- fusion that too frequently mark the descriptive portions, I have endeavoured to draw up the characters of the animals which I describe, with distinctive precision, and with order. It is said of Montagu that, in describing animals, he constantly wrote as if he had expected that the next day would bring to light some new species closely resembling the one before him ; and therefore his diagnosis can rarely be amended. Some writers mistake for precision an excessive minuteness, which only distracts the student, and is after all but the portrait of an individual. Others describe so loosely that half of the characters would serve as well for half-a-dozen other sj)ecies. I have sought to avoid both errors : to make the diagnoses as brief as possible, and yet clear, by seizing on such characters, in each case, as are truly distinc- tive and discriminative. Further to aid the student, I have given the characters in a regular and definite order, so that he may at a glance compare species with species, or genus with genus, in their several parts and organs. In this I have received little aid—I may say almost literally none—from my predecessors. The History of British Zoophytes