TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. xv 



communication 1 read to the Royal Society, Mr. Lubbock has 

 shown that species of the Entomostracous crustaceous genus 

 Daphnia produce living young in all respects like their parent 

 without any sexual intercourse. It would appear, then, that up 

 as high as the most developed forms of articulate animals, we 

 have evidence that there is no real difference between the func- 

 tions of reproduction and generation. 



If we turn now to the vegetable kingdom, we find perfectly 

 analogous phenomena presenting themselves. In fact, the modi- 

 fications of the reproductive function, which have recently excited 

 so much surprise, in the animal kingdom, are the normal forms of 

 the function among plants. In the roots and branches of a tree 

 we have a gigantic (t nurse," and the buds are its progeny. 

 Just as we find the same secondary products called " gemmae," 

 in animals either remaining adherent to their parent- stocks, as 

 in the Sertularian and other Zoophytes, or floating off, as in 

 Hydra and many others, so we find the buds of plants remaining 

 attached to the tree, or becoming separated from it. Just too 

 as we find a different form assumed by the secondary offspring 

 of the " nurse," as in the scolex-head of the cystic-worm, so 

 we find in such cases as those presented by the ee bulbillus," the 

 ' ' bulb," and the ' { sporule," different forms assumed by parts 

 having the same relations in the plant as in the animal. So 

 likewise in the plant we find a greater change of the secondary 

 offspring taking place, when sexes are developed and flowers are 

 produced, and the hermaphrodite flower with its stamens and 

 pistils is the representative of the segments (proglottides) of the 

 tape-worm, with its male and female apparatus in a common 

 envelope. We may go yet further with our analogies in the 

 vegetable kingdom. Here also we have numerous cases, in 

 which the germ-cell, the ovule, is produced, 2 and developes 

 within itself an embryo, quite independent of the influence of the 



1 'An account of two methods of Reproduction in Daphnia, and of the structure of 

 the Ephippium,' by John Lubbock, Esq., F.G.S. Read January 29tb, 1857. 



2 See ' Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science/ p. 228; also Lubbock, loc. cit. 



