318 Dr Martin Barry on 



derision, I have elsewhere stated that I had no objection. 

 Indeed, so far from this, I have published my thanks for it to 

 the proposer, as nothing could have been more descriptive of 

 the results at which I had arrived. 



I knew that nature had been faithfully represented in my 

 drawings, unassisted by the imagination, and that I had pub- 

 lished no more than a simple record of observations. It 

 therefore could not be doubted that the day would come when 

 others would see what I had seen. 



That day has at length arrived. And it seems due to the 

 Royal Society, in whose Transactions the paper in question 

 was published, as well as to myself, that I should thus pub- 

 licly state the observations just mentioned, so long ridiculed 

 as " moonshine," and " a myth," to have been fully confirmed. 

 In a paper, " De cellula vegetabili fibrillis tenuissimis 

 conteocta (Lundo?, 1852), it is shewn by Agardh, from re- 

 searches in Conferva Melagonium, Griffithsia equisetifolia, 

 and Polysiphonia complanata, not only that vegetable mem- 

 brane is formed by fibre, but that the fibre forming vegetable 

 membrane has the very structure that has been so much 

 ridiculed in my drawings, being composed of spirals, which in 

 number he delineates as two* Farther, he delineates each 

 of these two spirals as dividing into a spiral fasciculus, so 

 that each fibre becomes converted into two fasciculi of spi- 

 rals ;t thus demonstrating the truth of what I had said ten 

 years before, that the spirals of fibre, however small, contain 

 the elements of future structures to be formed by division 

 and subdivision, to which no limits can be assigned. 



But my paper of 1842 contains a record of other observa- 

 tions made in a field beyond the region of Agardh' s re- 

 searches ; observations which I think explain how it is that 

 fibre forms the membrane of the cell, and what I deem of 

 more importance still — the mode of origin of fibre. I must 

 here refer to the drawings in that paper, from which, in con- 

 nection with facts that I had previously recorded in the Philo- 



* Agardh, loc. cit., Tab. I., fig. 8. 



t As in Conferva Melagonium, loc. cit., Tab. I., fig. 8. 



