130 REPORT— 1840. 
Dr. Barry then read, from the Royal Society’s “ Proceedings,” a 
portion of the abstract above referred to, from which it appeared, that 
should the statements there made be confirmed, this very important 
question had at length been solved by actual observation. We refer 
to the abstract itself for an account of the remarkable results obtained, 
from which also it appears that the centre of the germinal spot is the 
point of fecundation, and the place of origin of two cells which consti- 
tute the foundation of the new being; results, however, which if con- 
firmed, must modify the views recently advanced on the mode of origin, 
the nature, the properties, and the destination of the nucleus in the 
physiology of cells. 
Dr. Barry’s observations were made on ova of the rabbit; and he 
afterwards confirmed them by an examination of ova of the dog. 
He had stated that the ova of birds, batrachian reptiles, and some 
osseous fishes, afford evidence of the operation of the same pro- 
cess: and it was very gratifying and important now to find, in 
the minute and beautiful delineations of such an observer as 
Agassiz, on the ovum of the salmon, what he (Dr. B.) could not but 
regard as a confirmation of his own observations on the ovum of 
Mammalia; though that observer would hear with surprise the expla- 
nation Dr. B. was giving of them. 
But such a process is not limited to the Vertebrata. It was to be 
recognized in the description given by authors of certain of the Mol- 
lusea; for instance, in that of Sars, on the development of the ovum 
of Tritonia, Doris, and others of this class of animals. What Sars 
supposes to be transformations of the yelk, however, will no doubt turn 
out to be successive generations of cells, the first pair of which arises 
within the germinal vesicle, as in the ovum of Mammalia. Shuttle- 
worth had discovered that red snow contains animal structures; and 
two days since, Professor Agassiz, having extended this observation, 
made known the very interesting fact, that the so-called Protococcus 
nivalis cousists of the ova of one of the Infusoria. Dr. Barry had now 
to mention, that while the drawings, which the Professor had given of 
these ova, were circulating among the members of the Section in that 
room, he had recognized in them traces of what seemed to him to 
have resulted from essentially the same changes as those in the germi- 
nal vesicle elsewhere. Further, the germ of certain plants’ passes 
through states so much resembling those occurring in the germ of 
mammiferous animals, that it is not easy to consider them as resulting 
either from a different fundamental form, or from a process of deve- 
lopment, which even in its details is not the same. In the growth, 
indeed, at all periods, and this both of healthy and of morbid tissues, 
there is to be recognized the same process, which consists, not merely 
in the origin of cells in cells, but in the origin of cells in the central 
part of what had been the nucleus of cells. 
Ina paper published in the “ Philosophical Transactions,” Part II., 
1839, Dr. Barry had shown that the mammiferous embryo is no part 
of a so-called blastoderma, but the metamorphosed nucleus of a cell. 
