208 On the Sexual Life of Plants, and Parthenogenesis. 



certainly cannot be the mother-cells of the spores which receive 

 the fructifying material, but the original mother-cell of the 

 entire hymenium contained in the archegonium. Where are we 

 to seek for the archegonium ? the history of the development of 

 the apothecium will inform us. 



Speerschneider has probably seen it in Ramalina calicaris, the 

 walls of the gonidia of which, he says, he frequently saw beset 

 with cell-like masses. To me, at least, it does not seem impro- 

 bable that the archegonial cell of Coenogonium has its equivalent 

 in the gonidia of the Lichens with a foliaceous thallus ; indeed this 

 view is not supported by Speerschneider^s observation, that go- 

 nidia also are developed into Lichens ; but even this phenome- 

 non, interpreted as a metamorphosis, is not in complete anta- 

 gonism with that notion. 



Similar laws of development hold good more surely in the case 

 of the Fungi, which are so very similar to the Lichens in their 

 organization. But here again we are not to expect to witness a 

 fertilization of the basidia and asci, but have rather to seek it in 

 the first rudiments of the pileus. 



Ehrenberg has probably seen the fertilization of the Amanita 

 rosea, and has described the conjugation of Syzygites; still, 

 carried away by the idea that there must be one single germ as 

 the immediate product of this process, he has not pursued the 

 study of the further development of the plant. 



That many of the structures described hitherto as species of 

 Fungi are not actually plants at all, but only abnormally 

 developed cells from the tissues of various plants and animals, 

 is an assertion long since made by Reissek and myself. 



I proved first the development of the yeast-plant from such 

 cells of tissues and from the mycelium of Fungi, and I pointed 

 out the necessity of instituting similar inquiries in various ways 

 and on a large scale, so that we might ascertain the lowest limits 

 which the specifically different multiplied plant-forms may reach 

 by reproduction, and learn to distinguish these from diseased 

 redundancies of elementary organs derived from the abnormal 

 conditions in which plants are placed. 



Bail and Hoffmann have in some measure corroborated these 

 views ; and I have myself often repeated these observations and 

 extended ray conclusions. 



That the segments, separating in a spore-like form, of the 

 pollen-tube developed in the form of a filamentous Fungus, are 

 developed, not in the same, but in quite a different form, and 

 consequently are not the members of a species of plants, was 

 shown by me by that investigation ; and it was proved by Hoff- 

 mann, Bary, Bail, Caspary, and others, that branches with 

 differently formed spores are produced on one and the same 



