THE LATE ETHEL SAKGAXT 115 



THE LATE ETHEL SARGANT*. 



Miss Ethel Sargant, whose premature death was rejwrted in 

 The Times of January 28, is a great loss to English botany. Her 

 work was not only accurate and sound, but it bore on questions of 

 fundamental importance. One nia^^ venture to say that she was one 

 of the few women who would undoubtedly have been elected into the 

 lloyal Society if the Charter had permitted. 



Miss Sargant was a ]:)erson of strong intellect, with a natvu'al bent 

 for scientific research, which she was happily in a position to follow 

 freely, with excellent results. She took Honours in the Natural 

 Science Tripos at Cambridge, but her career as an investigator began 

 a few years later, when she came to Kew, at the close of 1892, to 

 work in the Jodrell Laboratory. It was then that the present writer 

 first made her acquaintance and was at once impressed by her remai'k- 

 able capacity for ditticult research. She very soon settled down to 

 the stud}^ of the details of the process of nuclear division. Several of 

 her earlier papers were on this subject, then, as now, of urgent im- 

 portance for our understanding of the essential reproductive pheno- 

 mena, common to plants and animals. But in the meantime she had 

 jHiblished, in conjunction with the present writer, an investigation of 

 a very different nature, on a pitcher-plant, Dischidia Itafflesiaiia, in 

 Avhich the pitchers, instead of catching insects, sei've to collect water 

 and soil. 



After leaving Kew, Miss Sargant established a laboratory of her 

 own at home, in which she for some time had the assistanc(.' of 

 Dr. Ethel N. Thomas. Her laboratory was admirably e(]ui))])ed with 

 all the appliances for advanced histological research. For a time lier 

 work continued to be chiefly concerned with the nucleus. In ISJM) 

 she made a communication to the lloyal Society, which, though not 

 strictly original, was of great interest, for she was the first in this 

 countr}^ to confirm the discovery of the Russian botanist Navaschin, 

 that fertilization in the higher flowering plants is double, the endo- 

 sperm, or food-tissue, as well as the embryo, being the product of a 

 sexual union of nuclei. This she demonstrated, from her own pre- 

 parations, made some time before, but then first rightly interpreted in 

 the light of the Russian savant's work. 



Concurrently with her later work on cytology. Miss Sargant 

 began a course of investigation, which occupied the remainder of lier 

 scientific career, on the comparative anatomy of seedlings. If of less 

 general biological interest, this line of research led to results of moi-e 

 definite imjjortance from a botanical point of view. A joint pa})er 

 with Mrs. 1). H. Scott, on the development of the well-known Anon 

 maciilafum from the seed, was the first-fruits of this work, which 

 soon, however, assumed a wide scope and led to a theory of the origin 

 of Monocotyledons which has exercised a great influence o)i the minds 

 of botanists. As is well known, the higher flowering plants have 

 long been divided into the Monocotyledons with one se(.'d-leaf and 



* Reprinted by tlie author'.s permission from 'Hie Times Litcrurij Siipjilemeiit 

 of Jan. 31. 



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