ON RECENT ADVANCES IN VEGETABLE 



CYTOLOGY. 



PART I. 



DURING the last quarter of a century a considerable 

 change has passed over the aspect of biology, 

 especially in this country. It was formerly possible for a 

 man to be, fairly at any rate, well up in the two branches 

 of zoology and botany, but this is no longer possible, 

 regarded from our modern standpoint. Specialisation, 

 inevitable owing to the rapid advances which have been 

 everywhere made, has not only effected a practical 

 divorce between these two sciences, but the same disrupting 

 agency is operating continuously in each of them. 



None the less is it true, however, that there are certain 

 features of fundamental importance which are shared alike 

 by animals and plants. This community of structure is 

 most clearly recognised within the limits of the individual 

 cells, and it is perhaps nowhere more impressively demon- 

 strated than in the remarkable similarity which exists 

 between the nuclear division as observed in animals and in 

 plants, — a similarity which may extend to the most minute 

 details. 



The cell, using the word in its widest sense, is, as 

 Haeckel said long ago, emphatically the unit of life. For 

 though the several parts, such as nucleus and the cell- 

 protoplasm, which together constitute a cell, all possess 

 autonomy to a certain degree, it still remains true that it is 

 only when they operate jointly and in harmony that a suc- 

 cessful and "going concern," a living individual, is the 

 result. And since we have strong reasons for believing 

 that animals and plants represent the diverging limbs of a 

 stock traceable at the root to a common source, viz., lowly 

 unicellular organisms, it is obvious that the study of the cell, 

 of its structure and of the functions discharged by its 

 various parts, offers an immensely important, though it 

 may well be a very difficult, field for research. 



