GO 



Being in the scale of life far below the seed-bearing plants, 

 its life-history has its start in a minute spore, which is 

 essentially a tiny speck of protoplasm, invisible to the naked 

 eye, enclosed by a comparatively firm cell-wall. On 

 germination this outer coating bursts and a delicate thread 

 of green alga-like tissue creeps out over the soil, where it 

 begins to branch horizontally. Soon, dense green buds are 

 formed on these threads, which by development produce a 

 clump of moss-plants, some bearing at their apex male organs, 

 others female. Each female plant produces a spore, but not 

 of a kind from which it was itself produced. Travelling over 

 the damp moss-plants by means of extremely delicate proto- 

 plasmic hairs, the antherozoids from the male plants, which 

 essentially are equivalent to the nuclei of pollen grains, 

 ultimately reach the newly-formed spore, and coalescing with 

 it bring about its fertilisation. 



At once the spore germinates, producing a long hair (seta) 

 with a capsule at its upper extremity, the whole growing 

 parasitically on the parent moss-plant. This capsule, when 

 fully developed, contains a large number of spores. A hood, 

 and then a cap, fall off, and under suitable atmospheric con- 

 ditions a number of teeth open and the spores are dispersed. 

 These being of the same kind as those first referred to can 

 produce new moss-plants, and so the whole life-cycle of the 

 moss is at length complete. There are two distinct stages, 

 the form and activity of the moss being in them entirely 

 different. Under conditions such as these an organism is 

 said to pass through an alternation of generations. 



Comparison was finally instituted between mosses and 

 ferns. Both exhibit clear alternation of generations, but 

 whereas the plant is the first generation of the one, it is the 

 second in the other, indicating probably two lines of descent 

 from the algae, which are no doubt common ancestors of 

 both. 



JUNE 14th, 1906. 



Mr. Penn-Gaskill exhibited a dark, suffused specimen of 

 Tephrosia biundularia from the Potteries district, and a con- 

 siderable number of larvae of Ocncria dispav, the latter for 

 distribution. 



Mr. West exhibited examples oiEuclidia mi and E.glypJiica, 

 which he had taken in his garden at Ashtead. 



Mr. Sich exhibited a tumbler in which were thirty-nine 

 pupae of Picris brassiccv. The larvae, when young, had been 



