CRYPTOGAMOUS OK PLOWEBLESS PLANTS. 331 



the subject intelligible to the unpractised student. This can hardly 

 be done in so elementary a work as the present, but requires a sepa- 

 rate treatise. The student who has intelligently studied the present 

 volume up to the present point, is prepared for the more difficult study 

 of the structure of Cryptogamous plants, in the only general work of 

 the kind that has yet appeared in the English language, viz. Berke- 

 ley's Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany. An enumeration of the 

 Cryptogamous orders, with a brief notice of their structure and sub- 

 ordinate divisions, may be found in the systematic part of the pres- 

 ent work. A slight sketch of their grades of development as to 

 vegetation has ah-eady been given (97-113). "We here attempt 

 to present merely a very brief and general account of their plan of 

 reproduction, divested as far as possible of technical terms. 



652. Taken collectively, we distinguish this lower series of the 

 vegetable kingdom by negative characters only ; saying that these 

 plants do not bear true jiowers (consisting essentially of stamens and 

 pistils), and accordingly do not produce seeds, or bodies consisting 

 of a distinguishable embryo plantlet, developed in an ovule through 

 fertilization by pollen. Their spores (07), or the bodies produced in 

 their fructification by which they are propagated, and which there- 

 fore answer to seeds, are single cells, at least in most cases. Tliese, 

 as they germinate in the soil, or whatever medium they live in, un- 

 dergo a development at the time of their germination which has been 

 compared with that of the embryonal vesicle (579) during its devel- 

 opment into the embryo in the ovule ; and by growth directly give 

 rise to the plant. 



653. It was once thought probable, that these spores were pro- 

 duced, and were capable of developing into the jjlant without being 

 fertilized by other cells answering to pollen ; or at least that this was 

 the case in all the lower orders, such as Algee and Fungi, and in some 

 of the highest, such as Ferns. But the sagacious Linnaeus, by nam- 

 ing them Cryptogamous plants (i. e. plants with concealed organs of 

 reproduction) seems to have recorded his belief that they were really 

 bisexual, or furnished with two sorts of organs, the fertilizing and the 1 

 fertilized. A series of important discoveries, for the most part of; 

 recent date, have proved this to be so, — ^have made known a true I 

 fecundation in numerous species of every Cryptogamous order, and 

 in their lowest as well as their highest forms, thus leaving no doubt' 

 of its universality. The apparatus and the processes of reproduction,' 

 however, are wonderfully varied in the difTcrent groups of Cryp- 



