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COMMENTARY
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it was highly prized as an ornament by various Oriental peoples in ancient times, and that it was extensively exported from the Mediterranean region as an important article of commerce. Coral appears to have been used by the Greeks and Romans mainly for medicinal purposes.278 This belief in the special curative value of coral lasted well into modern times, for it was included in standard lists of drugs and in works on therapeutics as late as the last century.279 Red coral has long been supposed to possess magical properties; it was therefore worn as an amulet in ancient times, especially by children,280 and this practice has by no means disappeared today.
Apparently Theophrastus was not sure whether coral should be classified as a stone or as a plant. Pliny, on the other hand, was doubtful whether to classify it as a plant or as an animal; for though his descriptions lead one to suppose that he considered it to be a plant, his chapter on coral is included in his book on sea animals and the remedies derived from them. This illustrates the difficulty that naturalists have had until recent times in classifying coral. In his notes on this passage, Hill reflects the confusion that existed in his day when he says:
"The Nature and Origin of Coral has been as much contested as any one Point in natural Knowledge; the Moderns can neither agree with the Antients about it, nor with one another; And there are at this Time, among the Men of Eminence in these Studies, some who will have it to be of the vegetable, others of the mineral, and others of the animal Kingdom."281 Hill's own conclusion, which he defends at length, was that coral is a plant, and he roundly criticizes those who think otherwise. But he changed his mind in his second edition, where he says it belongs to the animal kingdom. The animal nature of most of the corals was not understood until after the middle of the eighteenth century.282
278 Dioscorides, V, 138 (Wellmann ed., V, 121); Pliny, XXXII, 24.
279 E.g., A. Stille and J. M. Maisch, The National Dispensatory (Philadelphia, 1880), pp. 464-65.
280 Pliny, xxxn, 24.
isiTheophrastus's History of Stones, pp. 97-98. But see 2nd ed., pp. 164-69. 282Hickson, An Introduction to the Study of Recent Corals, pp. 11-14.
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