52^^ Minnesota Plant Life. 



from each other, and each then builds up a new sexual plant. 

 Thus the phenomenon is equivalent to true twinning among 

 animals. It is extremely difficult to grasp this conception 

 without long familiarity with all the facts involved, but it is 

 regarded as very certain that the ordinary plants of forest and 

 field are really interpolations between the successive sexual 

 plants of their species. One might say, indeed, that the real 

 fundamental plants are, in such species, only those that form 

 sperms and eggs, while the great spore-producing organisms 

 are "structural afterthoughts." In such types as the seed- 

 plants or some ferns, the sexual plants are inconspicuous and 

 even microscopic. This adds to the difficulty of comprehend- 

 ing the true state of affairs, and it is still further obscured by 

 the false nomenclature and wrong significance that has been 

 applied to the parts of the flower. It must be remembered that 

 in a wilted Easter lily there are living numerous tiny organisms, 

 some male and others female. These are the real, primitive lily 

 plants. It is they that have the ancestral line reaching back 

 into the remotest past. The male plants are cobweb-like tubes 

 buried in the tissues of the rudimentary fruit. The female 

 plants are exceedingly minute organisms hidden one at the 

 center of each rudimentary seed. The great leaf-bearing, 

 flower-producing organism, rooted in the soil is an ''after- 

 thought" in the species. \\'hen this conception is taken into 

 the mind, then and then only is it possible to institute proper 

 structural comparisons between plants and animals. 



Very remarkable divisions of labor come to exist among 

 embryos in higher seed plants. In this group each female 

 produces two very minute eggs, with each of which a sperm 

 from the pollen-tube may fuse. One of the eggs forms an 

 embryo that can go on and develop into a plantlet, and, as such, 

 constitutes an essential portion of every seed. The other tgg 

 forms a degenerate embryo, known as the alhunioi, that fulfills 

 its function in the species when it is consumed by its stronger 

 twin. 'JMiis truly astonishing" cannibalism goes (ni in the seeds 

 of all higher flowering plants, but not distinctively in the seeds 

 of cycads, pines and their allies. In them the so-called albu- 

 men is the body of the mother-plant, and while more than one 

 tgg is formed in pines the embryos that arise are none of them 



