GERMINATION 



INTRODUCTORY 



I HAVE been trying, like many other and better men 

 who have gone before me, to peer through the veil 

 that hides from us the principle underlying what we call 

 life. The difficulty has been, or at all events my difficulty 

 has been to get back to the very commencement of some 

 form of life in a process wliich is not only continuously 

 reproductive, but which began ages before man came into 

 being on the earth. 



For a good many years I held the opinion that the onlj 

 way to arrive at some understanding of the subject was to 

 study plant life. The human foetus, prior to birth, is 

 dependent upon the maternal blood-stream and may be 

 said to live, if only with the life of the mother, until it com- 

 mences, with its first breath, an independent existence. 

 But it lives, in the sense that it is not dead, nor in a state 

 of suspended animation. That before birth circulation is 

 not completed through its lungs and it is not able to do 

 the things of which the infant is capable, does not affect 

 the question. It is alive. 



In the plant much the same thing obtains. The children 

 of the plant are its seeds and if we consider the process of 

 sexual reproduction we shall see that no hard and fast 

 line of separation can be drawn between animal and 

 vegetable. 



In his Text Book of Biology, Davis, writing of gymno- 

 sperms, cites the Selaginella, a common greenhouse plant, 

 as an illustration of sexual reproduction. 



In this the sporophyte bears male and female spores — 

 Microspores and Macrospores. Within the Microspore is 

 developed a very rudimentary male prothallus, which 

 originates one or more antheridia, producing mobile sperma- 

 tozoids. Within the Macrospore a rather larger female 



