Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/220

 embryo on the other, and their significance in the history of development, were brought out clearly by Hofmeister's investigation, while the exactness of his method rendered lengthy discussions on the subject unnecessary. With these embryological processes, especially those of the Rhizocarps and Selaginellae, in which the presence of two kinds of spores was now for the first time correctly interpreted, Hofmeister compared the embryology of the Conifers, and by their aid that of the Angiosperms also.

The results of the investigations published in the 'Vergleichende Untersuchungen' in 1849 and 1851 were magnificent beyond all that has been achieved before or since in the domain of descriptive botany; the merit of the many valuable particulars, shedding new light on the most diverse problems of the cell-theory and of morphology, was lost in the splendour of the total result, which the perspicuity of each separate description revealed to the reader before he came to the conclusion of the work, and there a few words in plain and simple style gave a summary of the whole. Briefly to describe this result in all its importance for botanical science is a difficult task; the idea of what is meant by the development of a plant was suddenly and completely changed; the intimate connection between such different organisms as the Liverworts, the Mosses, the Ferns, the Equisetaceae, the Rhizocarps, the Selaginellae, the Conifers, the Monocotyledons, and Dicotyledons could now be surveyed in all its relations with a distinctness never before attained. Alternation of generations, lately shown to exist though in quite different forms in the animal kingdom, was proved to be the highest law of development, and to reign according to a simple scheme throughout the whole long series of these extremely different plants. It appeared most clearly in the Ferns and Mosses, though at the same time with a certain difference in each; in the Ferns and allied Cryptogams a small inconspicuous body grows out of the asexually produced spore, and immediately produces the sexual organs; from the