Cell Stnicture, Growth and Division in tlie Antheridia of Polytrichum etc. 129 
ignorance of the homologies of the cells in question makes a different 
name desirable; but I can see no reason for the usage of those authors 
who distinguish the male gamete of an animal as a spermatozoön and 
that of a plant as a spermatozoid. 
For the cells produced by the last division within the antheridium, 
which are destined to be metamorphosed into antherozoids, there is no 
satisfactory name in use. Many authors have spoken of them as “sperm 
mother cells” or “antherozoid mother cells” — both obviously unsatis- 
factory designations, because a mother cell is now commonly thought 
of as one which is to give rise by division to daughter cells. Webber 
(1901) has suggested the name “antheroblast”, but decides in favor of 
the practice of other recent writers who refer to the cells in question as 
“spermatids”. Shaw (1898) goes even further, calling the grandmother 
and mother cells of the “spermatids” respectively “primary” and “secon- 
dary spermatocytes”. These terms are unfitting in plants, because the 
words spermatocvte and spermatid refer to certain cell generations 
in metazoa in which characteristic changes take place connected with 
chromosome reduction, and our use of the words is inseparably bound up 
with certain conceptions of chromosome behavior and chromosome number. 
Since in the higher plants gamete formation is not immediately preceded 
by chromosome reduction, the application of the terms spermatocyte 
and spermatid to the gamete-forming cells of plants involves a con- 
fusion of ideas. For these reasons I shall venture to suggest, for the 
cell which is destined to be transformed into an antherozoid, the name 
androcyte. 
In certain hepaticae, as was first clearly shown by Ikeno (1903), the 
final division in the antheridium is diagonal, cutting each approximately 
cubical mother cell into two androcytes, which throughout their further 
development remain in a closer relation to each other than to any of their 
other neighbors. A member of the penultimate cell generation, in which 
this peculiar division occurs, would naturally be designated an androcyte 
mother cell. In Polytrichum, as my observations show, and probably 
in other musci, the last division in the antheridium is not diagonal, but, 
so far as the plane of division is concerned, similar to those which precede. 
The cells of the penultimate generation, however, differ in several other 
respects from their predecessors, and for convenience they may be dis- 
tinguished, in the mosses asinthe liverworts, as androcyte mother cells. 
A member of any of the earlier cell generations (occupying the interior 
of the antheridium previous to the division which forms the androcyte 
mother cells) will be referred to as an androgone. 
Archiv f. Zellforschung. VUI. 
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