BOTANICAL SUBJECTS. 215 



XII.— STAMEX AXD AXTHER. 



The whorl or whorls of stamens or male organs of a flower — the 

 AndrcEcium, as some botanists prefer to call them — is now 

 universally admitted to be the transformation of a leaf or leaves. 

 The basis for this admission is founded on such a large number of 

 teratological facts that it has risen to the stage of a " moral 

 conviction." If stamens can revert to leaves it is logical to 

 believe them transformed leaves or parts of leaves. The trans- 

 formed specimens collected by Dr. Masters in his "Vegetable 

 Teratology," do not leave an opening for escape from this 

 conclusion. 



Now admitting, as we must, that the stamen is a leaf, the 

 question arises, what part of the leaf is transformed into an 

 anther. 



Asa Gray (" Structural Botany ") and others look upon the 

 filament as homologous with the petiole and the midrib, and the 

 two anther-cells as homologous Avith the two sides of the leaf- 

 blade. At p. 255, he considers that " pollen is a special develop- 

 ment into pecuhar cells of what would be parenchyma in a 

 leaf, and that the line of dehiscence is the line of the leaf 

 margin." 



This view is supported by what Thuret says of Porphyra 

 laciniata* " Les spores et les antherides naissent de la trans- 

 formation des cellules de la fronde." The transformation 

 apparently consists in the segmentation of the vegetative cells. 



Sachs, in his " Text-book of Botany," p. 541, considers the 

 filament and connective as the leaf, of which the anther lobes are 

 appendages. Moreover, on p. 490, he says that " these so-called 

 * sexual organs ' are really spore-bearing organs, comparable to the 

 spore-producing leaves of the vascular cryptogams." Further, on 

 p. 514, he says : " The pollen sacs of the coniferas resemble the 



♦ " Etudes Phycologiques," pi. 31, p. 60. 



