312 APPENDIX V 



of the three nutritive cells. Traces of this activity can be 

 seen in the different staining of the protoplasm. That 

 round the definitive egg nucleus remains a rose pink when 

 stained with carmine, while that round the other nuclei has 

 a coarse red colour, and a high magnifying power reveals 

 very clearly the meshes of the spongioplasm of this part 

 widened out, and dotted with small lumps of nuclein which 

 are evidently the lecithoblasts. 



On examining the small disk-like grains of yolk with a 

 very high power, and repeatedly changing the focus, the 

 small stained lecithoblast in its centre is found not to be 

 a nucleus surrounded with yolk, but a thread passing 

 through the disk, which is thus like a flat bead threaded on 

 the filaments of the chromatin spongioplasm. It is not, 

 however, a smooth thread which passes through the yolk 

 disk, but it has irregularities consisting of sometimes one, 

 sometimes two of the minute lumps of nuclein, these being 

 apparently nothing but slight thickenings of the chromatin 

 fibres. The yolk disks are, therefore, not nutritive masses 

 floating freely in the protoplasm of the cells (like starch 

 grains?), but they remain in organic connection with the 

 nucleus. 



There are many further points of great interest which 

 we have not yet succeeded in following ; for instance, the 

 nature of the membrane dividing the cells, its relation to 

 the spongioplasm, its gradual disappearance so that the 

 spongioplasm of all the four cells becomes one continuous 

 whole. We especially wished to find out whether the 

 threads of spongioplasm of the different cells ran into 

 one another through the membrane or not. The former 

 seemed to us to be probable ; if not, we should have to 

 assume that, on the disappearance of the nuclei of the 

 nutritive cells, and of the dividing membranes, the threads 

 of their spongioplasm joined those of the definitive egg- 



