Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/162

 principles of classification in these classes; he was still more happy in being the first to detect the peculiar structure of the flower of Conifers and Cycads, as compared with that of other flowering plants; it was he who perceived that what had been hitherto called a female flower in these plants was really a naked ovule, a view which Trew of Nüremberg had, it is true, suggested in the year 1767. He also called attention to the agreement in structure of the male and female organs in these families. Thus one of the most remarkable facts in vegetation, the gymnospermy of the Conifers and Cycads, was for the first time established, and this led afterwards through Hofmeister's investigations to the important result, that the Gymnosperms, which had been up to that time classed with Dicotyledons, are to be regarded as co-ordinate with Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons, forming a third class through which remarkable homologies were brought to light in the propagation of the higher Cryptogams and the formation of seeds in Phanerogams. No more important discovery was ever made in the domain of comparative morphology and systematic botany. The first steps towards this result, which was clearly brought out by Hofmeister twenty-five years later, were secured by Robert Brown's researches, and he was incidentally led to these researches by some difficulties in the construction of the seed of an Australian genus. He discussed in a similar manner, if not always with such important results, a great variety of questions in morphology and systematic botany; even purely physiological problems were raised by him in this peculiar way, and especially the question how the fertilising matter of the pollen-grains is conveyed to the ovule; he had already concluded from the position of the embryo that it is conveyed through the micropyle and not through the raphe and the hilum, as was then supposed, and he was the first also to follow the passage of the pollen-tubes in the ovary of Orchids up to the ovules; but this is a point which will be more properly considered in the history of the sexual theory.