CHAPTER. III. 
ON THE BALANCE OF THE ALTERNATING GENERATIONS 
OF ARCHEGONIATAE. 
HOFMEISTER’s great work on the Higher Cryptogamia, alluded to in the 
previous chapter, was not a mere description of observations, but a com- 
parative treatise. ‘It not only revealed the life-stories of the various types 
‘of plant-organisation which he examined, but in it he also showed that 
their several stages corresponded in essential features. Notwithstanding 
wide differences of detailed form and of proportion, it was demonstrated 
that, as regards position among the recurrent events of each life-cycle, 
the neutral generation, or sporophyte, and the sexual generation, or 
gametophyte, remained distinct and recognisable in such diverse plants as 
the Bryophytes, Pteridophytes, and Gymnosperms. In arriving at this 
conclusion it was Hofmeister’s great merit that he kept his eye securely 
upon those critical points where the individual life is represented by a 
ssinglé cell, viz. the zygote, and the spore. However differing in size or 
in complexity, he held as comparable, or, as it is said, ‘‘ homologous,” the 
phases which intervened respectively between those two events. This great 
generalisation of Hofmeister, stated by him with a brevity and a simplicity 
of language as remarkable as its content was new and far-reaching, has 
formed the essential foundation of all subsequent morphology of Archegoniate 
Plants. A series of examples will now be quoted in illustration of it, and 
these will be selected to show the differences in form and in the relative 
proportions of the two generations; but it will not be necessary to enter 
into a continuous account of the life of each example, for with certain 
modifications the essentials of sexuality and of spore-production remain 
the same in them all. 
In Reccia, one of the simplest of the Liverworts, the gametophyte, or /zccia- 
plant, as it is called on account of its being more prominent than the 
sporophyte, is a green, dichotomously branched thallus, showing localised 
apical growth, while it is thick in proportion to its area: some species float 
on water, others are attached by rhizoids to the substratum of soil. The 
Cc 
