Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/458

438 lated, and towards 1845 it began to be possible by critical examination of them to arrive at something like a clearer understanding of this part of botany. The majority of botanists readily accepted Schmidel's and Hedwig's opinion with respect to the Mosses; Vaucher had as early as 1803 maintained that the long-known conjugation of Spirogyra was a sexual act; Ehrenberg observed in 1820 the conjugation of a Mould, Syzygites; Bischoff and Mirbel explained the organisation of the antheridia of the Liverworts in 1845, while Nees von Esenbeck saw the spermatozoids of Sphagnum in 1822 and Bischoff those of Chara in 1828, though they were at first taken for Infusoria, an opinion maintained by Unger as late as 1834. But it was Unger, who in 1837, after careful study of the spermatozoids of the Mosses in 1837, declared them to be the male organs of fertilisation; in 1844 Nägeli discovered corresponding forms on the prothallium of Ferns, which had till then been called a cotyledon, and in 1846 the spermatozoids of Pilularia, the products of the small spores which Schleiden had explained to be the pollen-grains of that plant.

These facts were of the highest importance, but little was to be made of them as long as the female organ in the plants in question, the Mosses excepted, was unknown, and meanwhile it was only the resemblance between vegetable and animal spermatozoids which led to the conjecture, that the one had the same sexual significance as the other.

Light was suddenly thrown upon the subject, when Count Lesczyc-Suminsky discovered in 1848 on the supposed cotyledon (prothallium) of Ferns both the antheridia and the peculiar organs, inside which the embryo or young fern is formed. Though the statements respecting the structure and development of these female organs and of the embryo were inaccurate in some important points, yet the place was now indicated