French NolJGnal Instilule. 283 



oF the leaves, or rather that they accompany the base of tlie 

 pedicle of the urn : in short, he has shown them nearly in 

 all the genera. 



It is nevertheless this system, so strongly accredited, that ■ 

 M. de Beaiivois combats, in order to substitute in ils place 

 a svstem which he presented to the Academy of Sciences of 

 Paris in 1782, and of which the following is the founda- 

 tion: 



In the midst of this dust in the urns, which Hedwig re- 

 gards as the grain, there is a kind of nucleus or small axis, 

 more or less swelled, called by botanists a cohmella. Those 

 who have observed it have seen nothing else in it than a pa- 

 renchyme more or less cellular ; Hedwig represents it seve- 

 ral times in this manner : but M. de Beauvois says he has here 

 remarked some very small grains, and thinks that these are the 

 true seeds : the other dust which fills the urn around this nu- 

 cleus, is according to him the pollen ; the movements of the 

 ciliae of the edge of the urn, when these ciliai exist, have 

 only, as he thinks, for their object to compress the pol- 

 len against the seeds, in order to fecundate thein at the mo- 

 ment they are about to escape. Thus, according to M. de 

 BeauvoiSithe urn is hermaphrodite, and all the complicated ap- 

 paratus of the organs taken by Hedwig for antheras, and which 

 is found in almost all the mosses, has no use that we know of • 

 the individuals of certain species which bear rosettes only, take 

 IK) share at all in propagation ; the pollen is larger and more 

 abundant than the seed' : even the latter would have been in- 

 visible to ahiiosi every observer ; it would be fecundated, not 

 in the ovary, and while yet tender and small, as all other plants 

 are fecundated, but at the moment of its escape, and when 

 it \i already completely developed : in short, if we ask howr 

 M. tJedwig produced mosses, by sowing what M. de Beau- 

 vois Jihinks is nothing else than the poUeii, the latter an- 

 swers, that Hedwio sowed this almost invisible but real grain 

 at the same time with the pollen, without knowing it. It 

 may bethought, that in order to confirm so novel an opinion, 

 this grain should not only have been exhibited, but it should 

 jiave been sown separately and detached from the other : un- 

 ibrtunalely,however, liiis last experiment has not been made; 



andj 



