68 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [JANUARY 
essential matter at all. The result of my work published in 1895 went 
to show that in most forms there are two consecutive mitoses, the second, 
following more or less rapidly on the first, and I believed that in P. decipiens 
the brief interval might be so shortened as to have become practically 
obliterated. 
But the circumstance that quadripolar spindles were shown by me 
to be plainly visible in properly fixed material of forms in which no such 
extreme telescoping of the normal sequence of events takes place, clearly 
proves that, whatever the significance of the quadripolar spindle may 
be, it certainly is not essentially related to a simultaneous distribution 
of the chromosomes amongst four daughter nuclei, and I never thought 
it was. 
What I believed in 1895 (and I have seen no reason to materially 
alter my view), was expressed as follows: ‘“‘The quadripolar spindle, then, 
is only a special case of ordinary karyokinetic phenomena; instead of 
two relatively large masses of protoplasm there are four distinct aggre- 
gations, one in every lobe, each exercising an independent strain, and the 
direction of the strains may continue separate to the very end of the 
process or not, according to the form and special circumstances of the 
cell.”* I may perhaps add, that the principal importance of the phe- 
nomenon, in my view, lay in its bearing on the permanence of the 
centrosomes, at that time a widely accepted doctrine. 
In the second place, Mr. Moore seems to think that his observations 
on P. Lyellii vitiate the conclusions based on a study of P. decipiens. 
I venture to think they do nothing of the sort. It is clear that the two 
species differ in the form of their spore mother-cells to a marked degree, 
and also that this difference is exactly of a nature to account for the unequal 
persistence of the peculiarities of the spindle in the two cases. For the 
lobing of the spore mother-cell is so much less in P. Lyellii than in the 
other species, that it would be a matter for surprise if the quadripolar 
character of its spindle were so long retained. 
I confess, however, that I should have expected centrospheres to be 
present at the stages represented in pl. III, figs. 1-3 of Mr. Moore’s 
paper. They are so obviously demonstrable in Ameura pinguis and in 
Fossombronia pusilla, the spore mother-cells of which resemble in their 
lobing those of Mr. Moore’s plant. 
One feels a little difficulty in repressing a suspicion as to the successful 
fixation of his material, a suspicion not dispelled by the further contem- 
plation of figs. r2 and 13. They so faithfully depict preparations I have 
t Annals of Botany 9: 508. 
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