May, 1905.] The Nature of the Reduction Division. 



335 



for saying, as some do, that the gametophyte generation begins 

 with the sporocyte than it would be to insist that the first stage 

 of the sporophyte consists of the egg and sperm before conjuga- 

 tion. The gametophyte is, of course, the sexual generation and 

 the sporophyte the nonsexual generation, both from the mor- 

 phological and physiological points of view. In the higher plants 

 the gametophytes are very much reduced and some have insisted 

 in retaining the old misapplied sex terms for the sporophyte. 

 But this leads merely to a confuison of terms and ideas. To 

 compare pollination, the growth of the pollentube, and the other 

 processes connected with the development of the gametophytes 

 of higher plants with fertilization, as it exists in the sexual gen- 

 erations of plants and animals, is only comparing things that are 

 not even analogous and giving such diverse meanings to sex 

 terms that they lose their real significance entirely. 



yatietofiji 



9 S'forophji* 



Fig. 2. Diagram showing principal stages in the hfe cycle of the higher 

 plants. 



Injthe higher animals we appear to have a condition similar 

 to|that in Fucus, a ''2x" gamete-producing organism in which 

 reduction takes place before the formation of gametes. The egg 

 with its polar bodies represents four original eggs comparable to 

 the four spermatozoids developed from the spermatocyte. It is 

 interesting to note that in some of the Brown Algae part of the 

 eight eggs which are produced after reduction also degenerate. 

 Furthermore, the eggs of the Fucaceae are discharged while in all 



