Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/459

] where it might be presumed that the fertilisation by the spermatozoids takes place ; and as the history of the germination of the rest of the vascular Cryptogams was to some extent known through the earlier labours of Vaucher and Bischoff, the organs of fructification of these plants might now be sought, where they are really to be found. But an erroneous idea respecting the meaning of the small spores of the Rhizocarps propounded by Schleiden had first to be put out of the way, and this was done by an appeal to the discovery of Nägeli mentioned above and by the investigations of Mettenius. Then in 1849 Hofmeister supplied a connected description of the germination of Pilularia and Salvinia, in which the decisive points as regards the sexual act were clearly set forth, and the connection of the spermatozoids with the fertilisation of the egg-cells in the archegonium was established. He did the same for Selaginella, which is very unlike the Rhizocarps and Ferns, and in which the spermatozoids are developed from smaller spores, and fertilise the egg-cells in archegonia formed in the prothallium of the large spores. By comparing the processes of germination in these plants with those of Ferns and Mosses, he succeeded in throwing entirely new light on the whole of the morphology of these classes of plants, and thus made it possible for the first time to compare them with one another and with the Phanerogams, and to form a right estimate of the sexual act in the Muscineae and Vascular Cryptogams in its relation to the history of the development of these plants. Hofmeister arrived at the following conclusion from his observations in 1849: 'The prothallium in the vascular Cryptogams is the morphological equivalent of the leaf-bearing Moss-plant, while the leafy plant of a Fern, of a Lycopodium and a Rhizocarp answers to the capsule of the Moss. In Mosses as in Ferns there is an interruption of the vegetative development by sexual procreation, an alternation of generations ; this takes place in the Vascular Cryptogams very soon after germination, in the Mosses much later.' The vast importance of this dis-