396 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
phyte, with its two complete sets of chromosomes, is really two beings 
in one, by designating it as the ‘2X generation.’ This contrasts it 
at once, in this important characteristic of chromosome number, with 
the gametophyte or “X generation.” 
Apparently, then, no actual fusion of the chromosomes is included 
in the nuclear union occurring at fertilization. The question at 
once arising is: Where in the life cycle is there any fusion, or intimate 
union of these inheritance-bearing units? The answer to this question 
was for some time generally believed to be offered by the phenomena 
associated with the process of ‘“synapsis.”’ Botanists had for some 
time noticed and figured the peculiar contraction of the chromatin 
of the spore mother-cell nucleus occurring just before the chromo- 
somes for the reduction division are formed. Moore (1895) reaffirmed 
Strasburger’s view that, even with the best preservation, the chro- 
matin regularly assumes this condition at sporogenesis, and then only. 
Moore, therefore, declared this condition to be not an artifact, as many 
workers had held, but a natural process, which he named ‘“‘synapsis.”’ 
In spite of the insistence by an occasional worker that synapsis is an 
artifact, the impression of its constancy and peculiarity erew more 
general at the end of the last century. Then in 1901 Montgomery 
suseested that it is in this process that the long-delayed union of the 
paternal and maternal chromatin occurs. Montgomery’s conception, 
that each of the double or bivalent chromosomes formed on emer- 
gence from synapsis is made up of a paternal and a maternal chro- 
mosome, which have in some way been paired up during the synaptic 
process, came to be rather generally accepted. 
Recently, however, a number of workers have dissented vigorously 
from the view that synapsis is a constant, or a highly significant 
process. Thus Gregoire (1910), Gates (1911), and Faved (1912) 
hold that it does not occur unfailingly at sporogenesis. Lawson says 
that so much of the separation of the chromatin from the nuclear 
wall as is not due to fixation is attributable to the more rapid growth 
of the nuclear wall than of the chromatin. Finally all three agree 
that such a process is not needed for the pairing of the chromosomes, 
since, as was observed by Strasburger (1905) and others, the chromo- 
somes may regularly appear in pairs in the vegetative mitoses of the 
sporophyte. Moreover, studies of the vegetative nuclei of the sporo- 
phyte, especially by Gregoire and his students, show that their chro- 
mosomes are closely connected by adhesions, and by pseudopodium- 
like strands developed between the viscid chromosomes when the new 
reticulum is formed after each mitosis. Gates (1911), after reviewing 
recent work on this point, holds that the pairs seen in vegetative 
mitoses are of a paternal and a maternal chromosome each. He sees 
no adequate reason for thinking that the association of parental 
chromosomes at synapsis is any more intimate than that which occurs, 
