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...