The Seniors of the Forest 295 
microscopic, and never leaves the spore, but con- 
tinues utterly dependent upon the parent-tree so 
long as it lives. And careful investigation and 
comparison show in the highest flowering plants 
the last vestiges of the prothallus, here almost 
obliterated, but still distinct enough to show the 
far-off kinship of fern and rose. 
A few years ago naturalists believed that the 
ovule of the flowering plants was quickened by 
union with a globule of protoplasm from the pol-. 
len-tube, while the female cell of the higher flower- 
less plant developed at the vitalizing contact of a 
spermatozoid, and that here lay the great difference 
between the patricians and the plebeians of the 
vegetable world. 
But recently Mr. Herbert Webber has studied 
the whole process of fertilization in a subtropical 
gymnosperm, the coontie or arrow-root of southern 
Florida (Zamia integrifolia). 
His investigation has proved that the kinship 
between the flowering and the flowerless plants is 
far closer than has been hitherto supposed. For 
what goes down through the pollen-tube of the 
coontie-blossom is not a mere globule of jelly, as 
in the crocus, or two globules of jelly, as in the 
pine, but two peg-top-shaped spermatozoids, 
