FERNS. 
77 
paying attention to his treatise. This certainly has not been 
the case ; the treatise he alludes to was published forty years 
ago, in a journal which attracted more attention, and had a 
greater circulation, than was the case with Sprengel’s draw- 
ings. But on following the particular and elaborate illustra- 
tion of the author, I first observed the thickened ends of the 
nerves, and also, more externally, granules, which I took to 
be the author’s anthers, but which appeared to me more 
like excretions. I have frequently sought in vain for definite 
forms, and it was certainly owing to this that I did not say 
any thing about it publicly, until at last the recollection of 
these granules vanished from my memory altogether, and I 
only recollected the impression of the very remarkable thick- 
ened ends of the nerves, which do not occur in any other class 
of plants, Sprengel has directed attention to similar points 
in the Crassula crenata, but these are very different from 
these thickened ends of the nerves, which consist of a bundle of 
spiroids, as they have been represented in the Icon, Sel. An. 
Bot. part iii. tab. 3, fig. 8. If any parts are to be regarded 
as anthers, they evidently are those which Blume first of all 
definitely indicated, and which are represented in the same 
part of the Icon. Sel. tab. 3, fig. 1-5 ; they certainly have 
the greatest analogy with anthers, although I by no means 
attribute to them the same functions which are possessed by 
the anthers of the phanerogamous plants. For we need only 
reflect upon the eye of the mole, which certainly cannot see 
with it, to be convinced that nature sometimes also arranges 
things for no particular purpose. But provided even that 
these anthers of the fern, or the parts acknowledged as such 
by Bernhardi, really possessed the function of impregnation, 
I yet cannot see how hybrids can be produced in this class 
of plants. With regard to the anthers of Biume, they are 
too near the pistils of the same species ; and as to those of 
Bernhardi, the pistils in other species are situated at so 
remote a locality, that it is impossible to explain how the one 
could get to the other. 
469 
