Jean André de Peyssonnel was born at Marseilles in 1694. He was a student of medicine and natural history at Paris when the Académie des Sciences charged him with the task of studying the coral on the sea-shore. Peyssonnel began his observations in the neighbourhood of Marseilles in 1723. He pursued it on the North African coast, where he had been sent on a mission by the Government. Aided by a long series of observations as exact as they were delicate, Peyssonnel demonstrated that the pretended flowers which the Count de Marsigli thought he had discovered in the coral, were true animals, and showed that the coral was neither plant nor the product of a plant, but a being with life, which he placed in the first "rung" of the zoological ladder. "I put the flower of the coral," says Peyssonnel, "in vases full of sea-water, and I saw that what had been taken for a flower of this pretended plant was, in truth, only an insect, like a little sea-nettle, or polyp. I had the pleasure of seeing removed the claws or feet of the creature, and having put the vase full of water, which contained the coral, in a gentle heat over the fire, all the small insects seemed to expand. The polyp extended his feet, and formed what M. de Marsigli and I had taken for the petals of a flower. The calyx of this pretended flower, in short, was the animal, which advanced and issued out of its cell." The observations of Peyssonnel were calculated to put aside altogether theories which had lately attracted universal admiration, but they were coldly received by the naturalists, his contemporaries. Réaumur distinguished himself greatly in his opposition to the young innovator. He wrote to Peyssonnel in an ironical tone: "I think (he says) as you do, that no one has hitherto been disposed to regard the coral as the work of insects. We cannot deny that this idea is both new and singular; but the coral, as it appears to me, never could have been constructed by sea-nettles or polyps, if we may judge from the manner in which you make them labour."