198 ARTHUR HENFREY 



and Magazine of Natural History^ in November of the same 

 year, he speaks much more guardedly. "These researches are 

 in the highest degree curious, and if the facts related prove to be 

 correct, most importantly affect the received views of analogies 

 in the generative processes of plants." 



At the same time Henfrey says he hopes to speak more 

 definitely on this matter when his own investigations are com- 

 plete. Two years later his own very careful work in the same 

 field was laid before the Linnean Society, in which he cor- 

 roborated the main facts that had come to light. Turning once 

 again to the paper of Suminski, after making certain criticisms 

 of detail, Henfrey handsomely remarks " Nothing however can 

 take from him the credit of having discovered the archegonia 

 and their import, one of the most important discoveries in 

 physiological Botany of modern times since it has led to results 

 revolutionising the whole theory of the reproduction of plants 

 and opened out a totally new sphere of inquiry into the laws 

 and relations of vegetable life." 



For some little time after these discoveries the archegonia of 

 the fern were, on the initiative of Mercklin, commonly referred to 

 as the " organs of Suminski," a custom which happily fell into 

 desuetude. Mercklin, in his paper, which essentially repeats the 

 work of Suminski, states that he devoted his entire attention 

 for three months to the fern prothalli before he succeeded in 

 observing the entrance of a spermatozoid. 



In reviewing the early papers of the Hofmeisterian epoch 

 papers which form the bed-rock of the existing morphology 

 one is struck with the marvellous rapidity with which their signi- 

 ficance was apprehended. We find the phrase "alternation of 

 generations " employed within two years of the discoveries of 

 Suminski, whilst by the early fifties the general genetic relations 

 of the vascular series were realized in quite a new light. 



As Sachs puts it : "When Darwin's theory was given to the 

 world eight years after Hofmeister's investigations, the relations 

 of affinity between the great divisions of the vegetable kingdom 

 were so well established and so patent that the theory of descent 

 had only to accept what genetic morphology had actually brought 

 to view." 



