470 



NA TURE 



[March 15, 1900 



Haupt, Dillmann, Miillenhoff and , Lepsius ; among 

 mathematicians and physicists, Dirkhlet, Kronecker, 

 Erman, Dove, Kiichhoff, Kundt ahd Helmholtz ; 

 among chemists, Mitscherlich and Hofmann ; among 

 astronomers. Bode, Ideler, Encke ; among geographers 

 and cartographers, Ritter and Kiepejct ; and among 

 biologists. Link, Braun, Lichtenstein, Ehrenberg, 

 Miiller and du Bois-Raymond. The above names re- 

 present only a selection, but these eminent members by 

 their works have permanently influenced, and have 

 stamped their individualities upon, the various sciences 

 to the investigation of which they devoted their best 

 powers and their lives. The Berlin Academy, and the 

 very few institutions which resemble it, are the only 

 places where men of such diverse qualifications and 

 acquirements as Schleiermacher, Ranke, Lepsius, Dill- 

 mann, Seebeck, Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Hofmann and 

 Encke could be found sitting together as members and 

 discussing the best methods for furthering the universality 

 of knowledge. In Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg 

 the past and present members of the Academies have 

 carried out the mtentions of their founders, and every 

 branch of human knowledge has been considered worthy 

 of recognition and encouragement at their hands. 



The Academy at Paris was originally founded for the 

 preservation of the French language, but the French 

 savants soon found that it was necessary to establish 

 other bodies which should represent the arts, and sciences, 

 and archaeology. Hence the Academie des Inscriptions, 

 the Academie des Sciences, and the Academie des 

 Beaux Arts came into being ; in 1795 these Royal 

 Academies were combined under the general title of 

 Institut National. Thus together they represent all 

 natural knowledge, and the various Academies really 

 form sections of one great controlling and directing 

 intellectual power in France. The operations of this 

 power are so extensive that even a writer like M. Zola 

 thinks himself entitled to enrolment among the members 

 •of one of its great sections. 



When Herr Waldeyer had read his festival address he 

 proceeded to report to the meeting what works the 

 Academy had in hand, and to describe the progress which 

 had been achieved in them. These included a Corpus 

 of Greek inscriptions under the direction of Kirchhoff, a 

 Corpus of Latin inscriptions under the direction of HH. 

 Mommsen and Hirschfeld, the publication of the Com- 

 mentaries on Aristotle, of the political correspondence of 

 Frederick the Great, of the Acta Berussica, of the Latin 

 Thesaurus by Diels, of an edition of the works of Weier- 

 strass, of the work of Kant, of the Arabic history of Ibn 

 5aad, of an Egyptian Dictionary, &c. ; to give a list of 

 all the works upon which the Academy is engaged would 

 exhaust our space, and the curious reader will tind them 

 all mentioned on p. 45 ff. of the tiilzungsberichte. 



The writing of these remarks causes many disquiet- 

 ing facts to cross the mind ; foremost among them is that 

 which tells us that there is no equivalent in England of the 

 Academy of Sciences at Berlin. In its earlier years the 

 Royal Society in a measure occupied in England the 

 position now held by the Academy at Berlin in Germany, 

 but such is no longer the case. The founders of the Royal 

 Society apparently intended its members to be recruited 

 from the ranks of scientific men of every kind, and the first 

 .seventy volumes of the Philosophical Transacfions bear 

 testimony to the truth of this assertion. The pages of that 

 work were open to every scholar and man of science, pro- 

 yided that he had something to say and knew how to say 

 it, and as a result the earlier volumes of the Philosophical 

 Transactions are wider in their scope than the later ones. 

 Thus if the reader will take the trouble to turn over their 

 pages, he will find papers on Latin, Greek, French, Irish, 

 Phoenician, Etruscan and Runic inscriptions ; accounts 

 •of pigs of lead, a tesselated pavement, a leaden coffin, 

 Irish urns, &c. ; an extract from a letter comparing the 

 NO. 1585. VOL. 61] 



Egyptian and Chinese languages, and even a paper "On 

 judging of the age of learned authors by style." Mr. P. 

 H. Maty's Index of the first seventy volumes of the 

 Philosophical Transactions, published in 1787, will supply 

 many other examples of the extreme comprehensiveness 

 of the scope and view of the Royal Society in its earlier 

 years. 



Slowly but surely the view of the Society has 

 narrowed itself, and almost the only welcome guests 

 are the mathematician, and physicist, and biologist ; 

 in like manner the Philosophical Transactions and Pro- 

 ceedings have become the home of "papers" in which 

 letterpress and figures and algebraic signs appear in 

 almost equal proportions. Papers on philology and 

 archaeology are extremely few, whilst those on physics 

 and physiology greatly preponderate. Is it too late for 

 the Royal Society to come back to the original field of 

 its investigations } And although everything " made in 

 Germany" is not necessarily good, it would probably 

 gain more power and increase its influence if it imitated 

 the excellent example afforded by the Academy of 

 Sciences at Berlin in its efforts to further the universality 

 of knowledge. 



THE POTENCY AND PREPOTENCY OF 

 POLLEN. 

 T N his book on " Cross and Self-fertilisation of Plants " 

 (PP- 393-401)) Charles Darwin called special atten- 

 tion to the subject of pollen-prepotency, and showed that 

 numerous cases occur where the ovary of a given flower 

 is more effectually pollinated by means of pollen-grains 

 from some other flower, or from particular anthers, than 

 by grains from its own anthers. If the two kinds of 

 grains be present together on the stigma, the prepotent 

 pollen is able to drive its tubes down the stigma more 

 rapidly than the other, and so the ovules are reached 

 first, and the egg-cells fertilised by the contents of the 

 favoured or successful tubes— a point of great significance 

 in crossing. Numerous examples were also given by 

 Darwin, which indicate far-reaching effects of pollen on 

 various parts of the flower and ripening fruit ; these 

 may be termed pollen-potency. Since Darwin's time we 

 have learnt much more of the processes which go on in 

 pollination and fertilisation, and, among other things, 

 that the pollen tube of, for instance, a lily, carries down 

 'in its end, floating in its protoplasm, two active nuclei 

 (generative nuclei) which bear in themselves the here- 

 ditable properties of the parent plant of the pollen, as 

 well as remains of another nucleus (vegetative nucleus) 

 of no use in fertilisation. 



N© fact in the domain of plant histology is better 

 established than that fertilisation consists in the union of 

 one of these generative nuclei with the nucleus of the egg- 

 cell in the embryo-sac, and the researches of Stras- 

 burger, Guignard, Farmer and others have rendered the 

 whole process of this nuclear fusion and its consequences 

 so clear, that even minute details can be correlated with 

 what occurs in organisms other than the flowering 

 plants. In this connection I need only recall the demon- 

 stration by Ikeno and Irase,^ and by Webber,^ that the 

 generative nucleus in the pollen tube is a spermatozoid, 

 and in Gingko and some other gymnosperms is even 

 ciliated and motile, and escapes as a true spermatozoid. 

 This important discovery has lately been extended by 

 Nawaschin,^ who found that the two generative nuclei in 

 the pollen tube of Fritillaria and Lilium are elongated, 

 and are emptied into the embryo-sac as writhing worm- 

 like bodies, and the same has been demonstrated by 

 Guignard •♦ for Lilitem Martagon. The main point was 

 also demonstrated by Miss Sargent at the last meeting 

 of the British .Association at Dover (September 1899).'* 



1 Hirase, Bot. Cent. 1897, p. 34. 3 Bot. Centralb. 18 



* Webber, Bot. Gaz. 1897, p. 16. 4 Rev.Gen.de Bot. 



8 Proc. R. S. vol. Ixv. 1899, p. 163. 



!. 77, p. 62. 

 , vol. ii. p. 129. 



