164 ERYTHEA. 
read again the vivid account which he gives in a footnote of 
the phenomena, so painfully familiar to many of us who have 
been teachers, exhibited in the staminal hair of Tradescantia. 
Sir Joseph Hooker * has well remarked that ‘the supreme 
importance of this observation,....leading to undreamt-of 
conceptions of the fundamental phenomena of organic life, is 
acknowledged by all investigators.’ It is singular that so 
profound an observer as Robert Brown should have himself 
missed the significance of what he saw. The world had to 
wait for the discovery of protoplasm by Von Mohl till 1846, 
and till 1850 for its identification with the sarcode of zoolo- 
gists by Cohn, who is still, I am happy to say, living and at 
work, and to whom last year the Linnean Society did itself 
the honor of presenting its medal. 
The Edinburgh meeting of the Association, in 1834, was 
the occasion of the announcement of another memorable 
discovery of Robert Brown’s. I will content myself with 
quoting Hofmeister’s+ account of it. ‘Robert Brown was 
the discoverer of the polyembryony of the Conifer. Ina 
later treatise he pointed out the origin of the pro-embryo in 
large cells of the endosperm, to which he gave the name of 
corpuscula.’ The period of the forties, just half a century 
ago, looks in the retrospect as one of almost dazzling dis- 
covery. To say nothing of the formal appearance of proto- 
plasm on the scene, the foundations were being laid in all 
directions, of our modern botanical morphology. Yet its 
contemporaries viewed it with a very philosophical calm. 
Thwaites, who regarded Carpenter as his master, described 
at the Oxford meeting in 1847 the conjugation of the 
Diatomacee, and ‘distinctly indicated,’ as Carpenter ® says, 
‘that conjugation is the primitive phase of sexual repro- 
duction.’ Berkeley informed me that the announcement fell 
perfectly flat. A year or two later, Suminski came to London 
with his splendid discovery (1848) of the archegonia of the 
3 Proc. Linn. Soc., 1887-88, 65. 4 Higher Cryptogamia, 482. 
5 Memorial Sketch, 140. 
