46 The Science of Life. 



with true morphological insight at the lower Crypto- 

 gams, Algae in particular; and both as a pre-Darwinian 

 and an anti-Darwinian he is of great interest in the 

 history of evolution theories. 



Although the study of the development of plants had 

 been well begun by Wolff, Brown, and Schleiden, the 

 Comparative history of the flowering plant's embryo was 

 Embryology. s ^{\\ obscure, and the development of flower- 

 less plants or Cryptogams was in great part unknown. 

 In other words, botany was awaiting its Von Baer who 

 should establish comparative embryology. The credit 

 of achieving this rests mainly with Wilhelm Hofmeister. 



From 1849 onwards Hofmeister published a brilliant 

 series of researches, in which he worked out the early 

 stages in the development of both flowering and flower- 

 less plants, and, much more than that, unified no small 

 part of the whole by detecting the alternation of gener- 

 ations which dominates a long series of plants from 

 liverworts to Dicotyledons. "The results", Sachs says, 

 "of the investigations published in the Vergleichende 

 Untersuchungen, in 1849 and 1851, were magnificent 

 beyond all that has been achieved before or since in the 

 domain of descriptive botany" . . . "the idea of what 

 is meant by the development of a plant was suddenly 

 and completely changed" . . . "alternation of gener- 

 ations, lately shown to exist, though in quite different 

 forms, in the animal kingdom, was proved to be the 

 highest law of development, and to reign according to 

 a simple scheme throughout a long series of extremely 

 different plants" . . . " the reader was presented with 

 a picture of genetic affinity between Cryptogams and 

 Phanerogams, which could not be reconciled with the 

 then reigning belief in the constancy of species" . . . 

 " what Haeckel, after the appearance of Darwin's book, 

 called the phylogenetic method, Hofmeister had long 

 before actually carried out, and with magnificent suc- 

 cess." 



It need hardly be said that some of the finest morpho- 

 logical work of the Victorian era has been inspired 

 by, and founded on, Hofmeister's remarkable achieve-* 

 ments, 



