Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/230

 ; it was shown that very different forms of sexuality and of general development occur in the Algae, and these led to the formation of systematic groups, quite different from those founded on the superficial observation of collectors. It soon appeared in the Algae, and later in the Fungi and Lichens, that special investigation must lay new foundations for the system. From the confused mass of forms not before understood, Pringsheim brought out a series of characteristic groups, which, thoroughly examined and skilfully described in words and by figures, stood out as islands in the chaotic sea of still unexamined forms, and threw light in many ways on all around them. In like manner the morphology of the Conjugatae was thoroughly examined by De Bary before 1860; fragments of the history of development in the Algae were added by Thuret, and he and Bornet cleared up the remarkable embryology of the Florideae in 1867, while Pringsheim established the pairing of the swarm-spores in the Volvocineae in 1869. The Algae offer at present a greater variety in the processes of development than any other class of plants; sexual and asexual propagation and growth work one into the other in a way which opens entirely new glimpses into the nature of the vegetable world.

The old conceptions of the nature of plants had been greatly modified by Hofmeister's discovery of the alternation of generations, and the reduction to it of the formation of the seed in Phanerogams; in like manner the first beginnings of plant-life, the simplest forms of Algae, exhibit phenomena, which compel us to revise our fundamental conceptions of morphology, if we are ever to be able to give a systematic view of the whole vegetable kingdom.

The methodical examination of the Fungi after 1850 led to similar but still more comprehensive results. From earliest times the Fungi had been objects of wonder and superstition; what Hieronymus Bock said of them has been told in the first chapter; this was repeated by Kaspar Bauhin, and similar