28 - LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
With regard to the male organ in sexual reproduction, 
Bennett and Murray adopt the term ‘‘antherid” and 
““antherozooid”’ rejecting the word “‘sperm,” though the 
recognised term in Zoology. I shall return to this point 
later on. Meanwhile I would merely point out that an 
antherozooid is physiologically and often indeed mor- 
phologically identical with the animal spermatozooid, 
and that there seems no reason for having two terms to 
indicate the same thing. ‘‘Pollinoid,” the term used by 
the authors to designate what is really a motionless sperm 
is I think specially objectionable, more especially because, 
as the authors acknowledge, it is physiologically identical 
with antherozooid, a point the authors emphasise by 
using the term ‘‘antherid”’ for the cell in which the 
pollinoids are produced. Scott’s objection to the term is 
also of weight, for pollinoid at once suggests pollen-grain 
with which the pollinoid has no relation. That some 
antherozoids should be motionless is a peculiarity attri- 
butable to the special conditions under which they are 
produced. Similar physiological peculiarities amongst the 
spermatozoa of animals at once suggest themselves, e.g. 
the sperms of most Crustacea, yet no zoologist thinks it 
necessary to distinguish these by distinct terms. Indeed 
in the Floridee, Wright has observed amoeboid motion 
in the ‘‘pollinoids” of Griffithsia setacea,* and the same 
phenomenon has been observed in the male cells of 
members of the genus Porphyra. 
I am glad to find that there is at last some chance of 
the ‘‘hideous abortion oospore’’ being definitely ejected 
from botanical textbooks. I must say, however, that the 
term ‘‘sperm,’’ which Messrs. Bennett and Murray desire 
to substitute for it, is, I think, in many respects even 
more objectionable. What is the unfortunate student to 
* “On Grifithsia setacea.”’ Trans. Roy. Ir. Acad., 1879. 
