( xii ) 



the latter, is supported by several considerations, of which the 

 chief is that it did not appear that the spermatia had ever been 

 found to germinate j and, in this case, it would be the apothe- 

 cium that should represent the other action. But nothing is in 

 fact known either of the organs, the process, or the place of the 

 supposed fecundation ; and the seemingly significant designa- 

 tions of the new structures chosen by their eminent illustrator 

 were perhaps only in anticipation of a possible result which he 

 was not, as no other has been, able to reach. The resemblance 

 already noted between the young apothecium and the spermo- 

 gone, in some lichens, so great indeed as to have led to a 

 common confusion of the two might however be well expected 

 to come again into consideration, when these forms of structure 

 were better distinguished. But Bayerhoffer (1860) was the first, 

 as Minks indicates, to give expression to the view that their 

 relations are most intimate ; and to conceive the spermogone as 

 distinguishable from, only as an early stage of, the apothecium. 

 This is not the place to more than mention the latter author's 

 development and illustration of what was perhaps little more 

 than a happy guess. Suffice it to say that, according to him, 

 the sterigmas, which indicate the beginnings of, and characterize 

 the growing spermogone, have for function the development 

 (not of the so-called spermatia, the difficulty of accounting for 

 the enormous amount of which as compared with the filaments 

 supposed to produce them, is noted by Ny lander I. c., but) of 

 the fruit-hyphae, which constitute, whether as sterile paraphyses 

 or fertile thekes, the disk of the apothecium ! But the cortical 

 layer of the thallus, out of which the spermogone springs, is 

 beset with the delicate threads of the hyphema, and it were 

 inconceivable that these should not make their way among the 

 growing sterigmas j abundantly as they are found to occur in 

 the youngest apothecia. And they do so ; and supply the other 

 content of the spermogone the so-called spermatia ; which are 

 of the nature of branches of the hyphema, and take the fitting 

 name of HypJiidia. Their office is to develop the tissue out of 



