A professor of natural history at Caen and a member of the Académie des Sciences, Jean Vincent Félix Lamouroux (1779–1825) made significant contributions to the field of marine biology. Following the appearance in 1816 of his Histoire des polypiers corralligènes 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.
