A species of animals called Zoophytes, by which are meant beings having such an admixture of the characteristics of both plants and animals, as to render it difficult to decide to which division they properly belong. They are animal in substance, possessed indeed of a stomach, but without the other animal characteristics of blood-vessels, bones, or organs of sense; these creatures live chiefly in water, and are mostly incapable of motion: they increase by buds or excrescences from the parent zoophyte, and if cut off will grow again and multiply; each part becoming a perfect animal. Myriads of the different species of zoophytes reside in small cells of coral, sponge, &c., or in forms like plants, and multiply in such numbers as to create rocks and whole islands in many seas, by their untiring industry. Polypus signifies having many feet, or roots; it is derived from the Greek. _Myriads_, countless numbers. Whence are the best and greatest number of Sponges brought? From the Mediterranean, especially from Nicaria, an island near the coast of Asia: the collection of sponges forms, in some of these islands, the principal support of their inhabitants. They are procured by diving under water, an exercise in which both men, women, and children are skilled from their earliest years. The fine, small sponges are esteemed the best, and usually come from Constantinople; the larger and coarser sorts are brought from Tunis and Algiers, on the coast of Africa. Sponge is very useful in the arts, as well as for domestic purposes. What is Coral? A substance which, like sponge, was considered as a vegetable production, until about the year 1720, when a French gentleman of Marseilles commenced (and continued for thirty years,) a series of observations, and ascertained that the coral was a living animal of the Polypus tribe. The general name of zoophytes, or plant animals, has since been applied to them. These animals are furnished with minute glands, secreting a milky juice; this juice, when exuded from the animal, becomes fixed and hard. _Series_, a course or continued succession. _Glands_, vessels. _Exuded_, from exude, to flow out. Is this substance considered by naturalists as the habitation of the Insect?