tree (??? ??) that grows underwater that goes by the (French) name 'coral'."

The Persian polymath Al-Biruni (d.1048) classified sponges and corals as animals, arguing that they respond to touch. Nevertheless, people believed corals to be plants until the eighteenth century when William Herschel used a microscope to establish that coral had the characteristic thin cell membranes of an animal.

Presently, corals are classified

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