4 i8 



NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



PT. HI. 



coat of seeds has a little hole in it which he thought was for 

 the purpose of letting the roots of the young plant grow out ; 

 and Mirbel in 1815 showed that when a young ovule, such 

 as you will find in the ovary of a flower bud, begins to grow 

 it appears first as a little swelling made u*p of cells called 

 the nucleus, growing on a short stalk, and that round this 

 usually two coats gradually grow, one outside the other, while 

 neither of them close quite round the nucleus but leave the 

 opening which Grew had observed, and which had already 

 been called the micropyle, " or little gate." It is, how- 

 ever, to the Scotch botanist, Robert Brown, that we owe 

 the first complete explanation of the use of these different 

 parts. 



Robert Brown was the son of a minister at Montrose, 

 and his first great step in botany was made 

 when he went with Captain Flinders' ex- 

 pedition to Australia in 1801, and spent 

 five months there, bringing back with him 

 4000 new species. He then became con- 

 servator to Sir J. Banks' museum ; and after 

 the death of that eminent botanist he removed 

 with the collection to the British Museum, 

 where he received ^"350 a year, and a pen- 

 sion of ^200 granted by Sir Robert Peel at 

 Humboldt's request. A whole volume might 

 be written of the additions which he made 

 to botanical knowledge, but we must confine 



, . 



ourselves here to his work on seeds. 



He established beyond a doubt that the pollendust - 

 funide, or little stalk/, Fig. 7 2, by which the ovule is attached 

 to the ovary, is the channel through which it takes in its 

 nourishment ; and that the micropyle, m, is the place through 

 which the pollen tube reaches the young ovule and forms a 



FlG< 



1 f ""'" 



? v " le I * Embryo ; 



f, Funicle ; tn, Mi- 



cropyie : 4 Grain of 



