25 
AL GrJE: THEIR STRUCTURE AND MODE OF 
REPRODUCTION. 
BY ALFRED W. BENNETT, M.A., B.Sc., F.L.S., 
Lecturer on Botany, St. Thomas’s Hospital. 
[PLATE CVI.]; 
It/TAGNUS inmaximis , maximus autin minimis is a saying 
which ha3 a large amount of truth in its application to 
natural science. As long as naturalists confined their attention 
to the largest and most perfectly developed representatives of the 
two kingdoms into which organic nature is divided, they could 
obtain but a very shallow insight into some of the most im- 
portant phenomena of life, whether animal or vegetable. It is 
the investigation — and especially since the microscope has been 
brought to its present pitch of perfection — of organisms either 
extremely minute or very low in the scale of organisation, 
of the Amoeba, the Ascidians, the simplest and often micro- 
scopic fungi and algae, that has led to those problems 
of the genesis and development of organic life that are now 
engaging so large a share of the attention of the scientific 
world. Into the discussion of these problems we do not pro- 
pose now to enter, but rather to give the reader a general 
account of the peculiarities of structure which occur in one of 
the largest and lowliest divisions of the vegetable world, the 
algae, and especially of that section of it known popularly as 
sea-weeds. 
The first great natural division of the Vegetable kingdom, as 
far as any division can be considered really natural, is into 
cellular and vascular plants. Plants belonging to the former 
division are characterised by their tissue always remaining in a 
cellular condition, and not developed into the fibro-vascular 
or any other of the tissues characteristic of the higher plants ; 
they are therefore, as a rule, destined to only a very short 
period of existence. It includes algae, fungi, lichens, Characeae, 
Hepaticae and mosses. Vascular plants, in which the cells are 
transformed into various kinds of vessels, and tissues thus 
