LECTURE VI 



HOFMEISTER ON THE VASCULAR CRYPTOGAMS 



WHILE Von Mohl and Naegeli were busily engaged in 

 working out the real nature of the tissues, more especially 

 of flowering plants, another and even greater anatomist, 

 Wilhelm Hofmeister, was producing a series of monographs 

 on the Archegoniatae which were destined to make his 

 name famous for all time. Not only did his researches 

 throw a flood of light on the structure and life histories 

 of the Pteridophyta and Gymnosperms but, by the facts 

 they revealed, they made it possible to see a unity of 

 plan throughout the vegetable kingdom, and broke down 

 the barrier that had hitherto existed between the lower 

 and higher plants ; they permitted botanists to see the 

 plant world as a whole, and to apply to it the phylogenetic 

 principles which were on the eve of being given to the 

 world by Charles Darwin. 



Hofmeister's work began in reality in 1840 with a 

 paper on the origin of the embryo in the Phanerogams, 

 wherein he showed that an ovum was present in the 

 embryo-sac before fertilisation, and that, after fusion with 

 the contents of the pollen tube, an embryo was formed 

 from it. He traced the formation of this embryo from 

 the oosperm up to the resting condition in the seed, and 

 thus confirmed and completed the earlier work of Amici 

 and Robert Brown. This, however, was only the starting 

 point of his great undertaking. He proceeded next 

 to investigate the life cycles of representatives of the 

 Bryophyta and Vascular Cryptogams and, later, of the 



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