210 BULLETIN UNIVERSITY OP MONTANA 



Introduction to Studies on the Fertilization of Plants. 



Maurice Ricker. 



The subject of fertilization in plants is introduced by a consid- 

 eration of the life history of an oak. This tree is usually well known, as 

 a tree. Some have shown surprise that it has a flower and thus I am 

 able to obtain the interest and attention, so necessary in the treatment 

 of a nature study subject To go to the complex forms of adaptation at 

 one bound would fail to give those who are wholly without botanical 

 training the necessary insight into the anatomy and physiology of flower- 

 ing plants. This treatise is an attempt to put this necessary information 

 into words of one syllable, as it were. 



Let us begin the study of an oak with the beginning of the plant, not 

 as a separate individual, but with the formation of the mother cell which 

 is afterwards to give rise to the plant. Brown and Mohl about 1840 

 showed that all organs were traceable to the one cell from which all the 

 others are formed. During the past fifteen years some of the foremost 

 biologists have devoted much time to the study of the cell. They have 

 "written many volumes and worked out many interesting things, even to 

 some interesting studies of the difficult problem of inheritance. But we 

 shall have little time for the consideration of their conclusions. It will 

 suffice for our present purposes to restate the proposition of the an- 

 cients, "Like produces like." A black oak tree originated from an 

 acorn borne upon a black oak tree. Of course the exception, so firmly 

 believed in by all small boys, of the snake being produced from the horse 

 hair, has to be dealt with. True the boy has not proved this by his own 

 experiment. The one he tried was planted in the wrong time of the 

 moon or in the wrong kind of a bottle, but he always knows some one who 

 did grow a true snake from a horse hair. 



Aristotle taught that life originated from ocean slime. He was un- 

 able to find proof of any material change in species. The last great pre- 

 > Darwinian battle was fought in the debate in Paris between St.Hilaire 

 and Cuvier less than a week before the revolution of 1830. Cuvier won, 

 at this time, by stating authoritively that skeletons show no change in 

 form, even of the cats buried 3,000 years before, with mummies in 

 Egypt. He overlooked the fact that conditions of environment which 

 might lead to change in structure had remained constant likewise during 

 the same length of time. We may defer the discussion of change and 

 state that black oaks come from black oaks, white oaks from white oaks, 

 burr oaks from burr oaks — let us see how. 



"We readily find the small yearling oaks under the parent tree. On 

 pulling them up we find the well known acorn. We know this acorn 

 grew upon the tree above. If it is spring-time we find no ripened acorns 



