200 ARCHER, ON STEPHANOSPHERA PLUVIALIS. 
reptant ameeboid state. But I do not see that such a view 
is in truth justified, so far, at least, as present knowledge goes. 
That a plant is a plant, and an animal is an animal through- 
out, we must I think certainly as yet hold, notwithstanding 
that certain phases of the one may under certain circum- 
stances temporarily simulate certain phases of the other. I 
conceive that we must, in our present state of knowledge, 
continue to believe that these free amceba-like reptant masses 
of vegetable protoplasm cannot, any more than the isolated 
motile ciliated zoospores or spermatozoids, be of animal 
nature; for—although, for a while, with more points in 
common with certain true denizens of the animal kingdom 
than is ordinarily the case in the vegetable cell—(so far as we 
can at present see)the former, viewed retrospectively, have had 
an origin different from the animal which they may simu- 
late, and, viewed prospectively, have before them a different 
destiny. 
Whether I may eventually be right or wrong in the opinions 
in this paper ventured to be put forward (and in regard to 
which it were folly otherwise to aver than that I am not so 
wedded to them as to be unprepared to relinquish them on 
sufficiently cogent evidence on the other side, though as yet 
I feel compelled to hold a present belief in their soundness), 
or whether such opinions may accord with those of others— 
the fact will still remain the same, that the membraneless 
primordial cells of the vegetable Stephanosphzra temporarily 
became ameceboid, and crawled about as quasi-rhizopods; 
nor will that fact per se have lost its interest, I trust, on ac- 
count of my tedious and awkward method of handling it. I 
add this, then, as another example of such a phenomenon to 
those already recorded in Volvox, Moss-radicles and Rhizi- 
dium, as one more humble contribution to the as yet indeed 
but comparatively slender stock of facts gleaned from the 
vegetable side of the organic world which bear on the ques- 
tion which I have ventured to discuss, and from which, when 
by degrees hereafter enlarged and strengthened, it is to be 
hoped that ultimately the Truth, as regards that question, 
may be evolved. 
