The Fern Alliance 
there are green cells and stomata on the capsule itself. 
The spore-plant has therefore an absorbing base, a stalk 
or stem, and a green capsule with many spores. 
But in the case of the fern alliance, the spore-plant 
is what we know as the fern, which of course has a 
well-formed stem, roots, leaves, as well as the spores, 
which are produced upon the leaves, The spore, 
which germinates on moist or wet ground, forms a 
tiny little half-fleshy prothallium about a quarter of an 
inch long, and it is this that forms spermatozoids and 
egg cells. 
Professor Bower considers that both ferns and 
flowering plants have developed from a spore-plant 
something like that of a moss or liverwort. In very 
ancient times, the spore-plant developed leaves for the 
purpose of carrying spores. Then many of these leaves 
took on the function of foliage leaves and ceased to 
bear spores. Typical roots developed from the base of 
such a spore-plant, and it also formed internodes between 
the leaf bases just as and when required.* 
In the flowering plants the sperm -cell (part of the 
pollen grain) is carried either by wind, insects, or some 
other means to another flower; but when the pollen- 
tube begins to grow down into the style so as to reach 
the egg cell, there are certain faint indications which 
seem to remind us that at some very ancient and dis- 
tant period it was a free-swimming, spirally curved 
sperm cell, perhaps like that of a fern, 
There are a few cell divisions during the develop- 
ment of both the pollen grain and egg cell which seem 
to correspond to the prothallium. 
* There are the three theories. (1) The leaf preceded the stem. (2) Leaf 
and stem appeared together. (3) The stem preceded the leaf. The reader must 
be referred to the original for further details as to Celakovsky’s Sprossglied 
theory, &c. When put in brief the discussion sounds as futile as, Which 
came first, the hen or the egg? 
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