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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 78. 



dress on Liberal Oilture and Professional Educa- 

 tion, in tlie cotu'se of which he justified the re- 

 cent action of the University in offering the B. 

 A. degree in place of the degrees of Bachelor of 

 Philosophy, Science and Law. He held that lib- 

 eral culture does not come alone from the study 

 of classics. "If it be said that the action of 

 Cornell University destroys the conception of 

 liberal culture, I reply that, far from destroying 

 the conception, it enlarges and revivifies it and 

 brings it into living relation with all the intel- 

 lectual and sesthetic elements of our modern 

 complex civilization. It is folly to suppose 

 that some parts of human knowledge are liber- 

 alizing, and others neutral or negative; or that 

 some institutions yield culture, and others 

 merely science." 



DISCUSSION AND COEEESPONDENCE. 



THE APPLICATION OF SEX TERMS TO PLANTS. 



To THE Editor of Science : If I do not 

 mistake Prof. Bailey's meaning in his article 

 ' On the untechnical terminology of the sex-re- 

 lation in plants' (Science, N. S. III., 825), he 

 advocates a use of the terms male and female 

 in semi-popular language which he acknowl- 

 edges to be in reality incorrect, since he accepts 

 as true the present view of the morphology of 

 the members involved. It should be re- 

 membered that this usage arose when the 

 morphology of the stamen and pistil was not 

 understood, and when the ovule in the pistil 

 was really believed to be an egg within an 

 ovary and the pollen grain in the anther, the 

 sperm within a spermary. The question to be 

 discussed is ' ' Shall this usage be continued in 

 ' common ' language ? ' ' 



It may be conceded at once that it is of no 

 practical importance to a horticulturist (whose 

 interests Prof. Bailey clearly has at heart) 

 whether he is taught to apply sex terms to 

 flowers and their members or not. Seed time 

 and harvest will not fail because he does not 

 know the plants he deals with. But suppose a 

 student whom Prof. Bailey has inspired with a 

 desire for more extended study goes to another 

 teacher for a course in morphology. He has 

 been taught to call a stamen a 'male organ.' 

 He is given a staminate flower of a pine. He 

 is permitted to call its members stamens, and 



in their ' maleness ' his professor of horticulture 

 has led him to believe. Very good. He is 

 then given a shoot of Equisetum, bearing what 

 the Manual is pleased to call a 'fertile spike.' 

 He discovers its close resemblance to the former 

 specimen, and perhaps thinks to call it a 'male 

 flower' and its members 'male organs.' But 

 as he studies the life history and seeks to dis- 

 cover the ' function of paternity,' in some unac- 

 countable way the maleness vanishes, and in- 

 stead he finds an organ exhibiting at the same 

 time both 'maleness' and 'femaleness' — dis- 

 charging at the same moment ' the function of 

 paternity' and 'the function of maternity' — ■ 

 quite as truly, at least, as the stamens ' dis- 

 charge the paternal relation.' 



Will Prof Bailey hold that the stamen-like 

 sporophylls of Equisetum should, therefore, ' in 

 the broad sense of common language,' be called 

 hemaphrodite organs? If so, what will he say 

 to the sporophyll of Botrychium or Onoclea, 

 whose spores produce a bisexual plant? By 

 what sex term will he designate untechnically 

 the office of such sporophylls ? I do not take 

 him here beyond the plants with which the 

 florist deals and about which he may rightly de- 

 mand instruction. Surely, in this day, Prof. 

 Bailey would not desire to perpetuate, even 

 among amateurs, the fiction that between the 

 ferns and the flowering plants there is a great 

 gulf fixed? Yet the loose use of language 

 which he advocates would seem to require an 

 affirmative answer. Into what hopeless con- 

 fusion this would plunge the poor student, only 

 he can imagine who has seen the difficulty with 

 which one eradicates from his thought and lan- 

 guage the misleading analogies which he has 

 merely acquired accidentally. How much more 

 diflficulty would they give were they inculcated 

 by a trusted teacher ! 



Although Prof Bailey enunciates briefly in 

 his introduction the doctrine of the alternation 

 of the sexual and non-sexual phases in plants, 

 he seems to have failed to grasp its significance 

 when he writes : ' ' Surely the prothallus is no 

 more sexual than a stamen or a leaf." The 

 essential character of the sexual phase is that it 

 produces gametangia, i. e., sexual organs, in 

 which the sex cells are diflerentiated. The es- 

 sential character of the non-sexual phase is that 



