BALFOUR AND SMITH—MOULTONIA. 351 
be arrived at by an investigation of the living plant. To enable 
this to be made we must hope that Mr. Moulton may be able to 
obtain ripe seeds for the cultivation of the plant. Meanwhile 
we may give here the morphological interpretation which 
appears to us as probably the right one of the parts as we 
know them. 
We suggest that the stalk and broad lamina are the parts of an’ 
outgrowth from the primitive protocorm of the plant—the stalk 
being hypocotyl, the lamina cotyledon—which it will not 
surprise us to learn has no other vegetative organs. From this 
protocormic outgrowth which possesses great meristematic 
activity the flowers arise. The whole construction of Moultonia 
is to us that of a plant showing a permanently embryonic 
vegetative state. 
Let us clearly understand what this means. 
Of the egg out of which every angiospermous plant develops 
one-half is devoted to the formation of a body of meristem-cells 
which is the primitive corm—protocorm—of a future plant ; 
to the other half which forms the suspensor is assigned the 
primary duty of regulating the position of the protocorm within 
the seed and of aiding in the feeding of it. The whole product 
of the egg—suspensor and protocorm—is commonly known as 
the proembryo, and is adapted to the intraseminal phase of life 
of the organism preceding the period of rest incidental to the 
seed habit. The degree to which development proceeds up to 
rest varies. As a minimum the suspensor may be no more 
than a single cell and the protocorm an undifferentiated body 
of a few meristem-cells. More advanced the suspensor may be 
pluricellular, even massive, with haustorial outgrowths pene- 
trating far in search of food, and likewise the protocorm becomes 
a body with haustorial extension in the form of lobes (one 
in Monocotyledons, two in Dicotyledons)—the cotyledon; so 
that there is differentiation into a central mass—hypocotyl— 
and cotyledon one or more. This may be all. But in more 
advanced states—and these are perhaps the more usual—a 
primordium of the hypogeous axis of the mature plant is laid 
down at the basal end of the protocorm as the primary root, and 
a primordium of the epigeous axis is laid down—at the apical 
end of the protocorm when there are two or more lateral cotyle- 
dons, at the side when there is one terminal one—as the plumular 
bud. There may be several such primordia. What has to be 
emphasised here is that the ordinary angiospermous plant, as we 
see it, is the product of two primordia arising out of the proto- 
corm. The protocorm is the embryonic stage. The root and 
shoot of the plant are the mature stage. In the former potential 
meristematic activity is spread through the whole protocorm, 
