CURRENT LITERATURE. 
BOOK REVIEWS. 
The phenomena of fertilization. 
FECUNDATION in plants is the subject of a treatise by Morrrer™ published 
by the Carnegie Institution, in which is discussed a variety of cytological topics. 
In judging the work the reader should bear in mind that the preface is dated 
August 1902, more than two years previous to the time of actual publication, a 
delay on the part of the Carnegie Institution that seems somewhat unjust to the 
author, and unfortunate in that it has withheld from investigators for many 
months an important contribution in a field of very active research where points 
of view change rapidly by reason of new discoveries. The book is chiefly a dis- 
cussion of the nuclear activities connected with “fecundation,” as the author 
prefers to call the fusion of sexual cells instead of using the more usual term 
fertilization. 
Preliminary to the main discussion MorTTIER gives a general account of nuclear 
and cell division, based chiefly on his own work upon Dictyota and various 
types of the Liliaceae. There is a brief account of the centrosome and blepharo- 
Plast, the author believing that the latter structure arises de novo and holds no 
Senetic relation to the former, which is the opinion of STRASBURGER, WEBBER, 
and others. The topic “significance of the sexual process and the numerical 
teduction of the chromosomes” is an excellent summary of STRASBURGER’S 
Views on antithetic alternation of generations. : 
The last two-thirds of the work treats of sexual processes as understood in 
the plant kingdom, beginning with Ulothrix and Hydrodictyon and continuing 
through higher groups, without any attempt, however, at an evolutionary dis- 
cussion. Indeed, the arrangement of forms follows closely the old classification 
of Sachs into zygosporic, oosporic, and carposporic types of sexual reproduction. 
hus the arrangement of types of the Conjugales side by side with Sporodinia 
under the heading ‘‘non-motile isogametes” seems a very artificial division, in 
" View of the many recent studies on multinucleate gametes (coenogametes). It 
_ S among the thallophytes that the work is likely to suffer most from the advanc- 
Ig investigations, and since 1902 papers on the coenogametes of several ascomy- 
Cetes have appeared, also accounts of oogenesis in Vaucheria and Saprolegnia, 
while the recent work of WotrE on Nemalion is likely to change very materi- 
ally our conception of the morphology of the sexual organs in the Rhodophyceae. 
_ The account of the archegoniates and angiosperms describes in detail the 
*Mortier, D. M., Fecundation in plants. imp. 8vo. pp- viii + 187. figs. 75- 
, Washington, D.C.: Published by the Carnegie Institution. 1904. 
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