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A professor of natural history at Caen and a member of the Academie des Sciences, Jean Vincent Felix Lamouroux (1779 1825) made significant contributions to the field of marine biology. Following the appearance in 1816 of his Histoire des polypiers corralligenes flexibles, he published in 1821 the present work, drawing upon John Ellis and Daniel Solander's seminal Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes (1786). It divides more than 130 genera known at the time into twenty groupings. Taxonomy has progressed considerably since Lamouroux's day, yet this work, complete with eighty-four exquisitely drawn plates, serves to illuminate the contemporary understanding and classification of some remarkable marine organisms, principally those which take the form of polyps, such as corals. Moreover, a copy of this work is known to have been consulted by Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle on his famous voyage of discovery the following decade."

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger PublishingA AcentsAcentsa A-Acentsa Acentss Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of intere