IN NATURAL CLASSIFICATION. 583 
physiologists appears to be, at present, to regard the spores 
of cryptogamic plants as more analogous to grains of pollen 
than to seeds. 
This opinion would lose much of its probability, did we 
observe the same gradual deterioration in male organs as we 
do in female. If it were admitted that the club-shaped 
threads surrounding the spores in Equisetum, are depaupe- 
rated stamina, we might then contemplate without surprise 
the disappearanee of this sex in simpler vegetables. But 
there is no reason for regarding these filaments (which when 
placed in diluted acid, coil themselves into a helix, some- 
times around the theca, sometimes distinct), as allied to 
Stamina, any more than we can impute a masculine character 
to the spiral coverings of the nucleus in Chara, to the elaters 
of Marchantia, or even to the spiral circumference of the 
frond entangling the clavate spores in Chorda. No, we find, 
in place of degeneration, the stamina and pollen as well de- 
veloped in the meanest grass as in the lordly oak ; and it is 
a thing certainly opposed to the ordinary laws of organiza- 
tion, this alleged sudden disappearance of an important 
organ. It is otherwise with the pistil and seed. The em- 
bryo, from being dicotyledonous, with distinct and easily 
demonstrable parts, loses, as we descend in the scale, one of 
its seed-lobes; becomes fused into an undistinguishable mass, 
and leaves an abundant albumen unconsumed, from its 
deficient development. The male, amongst all organized 
beings, is the most developed, and it is difficult to believe 
that this sex should be less necessary to organization than 
the female. 
But whether we consider the embryo as being already 
existent in the ovule, and called into efficient growth by the 
stimulating influence of the pollen, or that it is formed out of 
the contents of the latter, sometimes requiring an especial 
soil—the ovule—for its development, and sometimes, as in 
the case of spores, capable of expanding itself in the water, 
9r on naked rocks, or in the earth, independent of an organ- 
zed pabulum; in either case, it is plain that the pollen pos- 
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