The Sporing of the Fern 247 
men’s goods comes never by aid of fern-seed, and 
only sometimes by bribing or hoodwinking the 
powers that be. 
And modern science tells us that there is no 
such thing as fern-seed, for the tiny globular or 
oval bodies from which flowerless plants are per- 
petuated are not seeds, but spores. 
The seed, as we have seen, consists generally of 
two coats, enclosing a tiny plant and a store of 
food for its sustenance during the first few days 
of its life above ground. 
But the spore is much simpler in structure. Its 
morphological equivalent in the flowering-plant is 
not the ovary, nor even the ovule or young seed 
within the ovary, but it is a tiny vesicle or cell 
which formed inside the ovule when the flower first 
unfolded. 
In the flowering-plant the jelly-like substance of 
this cell mingles with some of the jelly in the 
pollen-grain, and after this union is complete the cell 
begins to grow and shape itself into a tiny plant. 
This union of the contents of the pollen-grain with 
the vesicle in the ovule has been understood, though 
less fully than we understand it to-day, for two 
centuries or more. Hence, all the plants which 
bear flowers with stamens and pistils, and so have 
