248 ELEMENTS OF BOTANY 
319. Reproduction in Ferns.— The reproduction of ferns 
is a more comprehensible illustration of alternation of gen- 
erations than is afforded by mosses. The sexual plant, 
gametophyte, is the minute prothallium, and the non- 
sexual plant, sporophyte, which we commonly call the 
fern, is merely a development from the fertilized egg-cell, 
Fie. 173. Plant of Lycopodium (L. annotinwm). 
and morphologically no more important than the sporo- 
phyte of a moss, except that it supplies its own food in- 
stead of living parasitically. Like this sporophyte, the 
fern is an organism for the production of asexual spores 
from which new plants endowed with sexual apparatus 
may grow. 
