Botany.] 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
5m 
more satisfactory grounds, a corresponding developement 
might then be said to exist in the essential parts of the 
male and female organs. The increased developement in the 
ovulum would not consist so much in the unusual form and 
thickening of the coat, a part of secondary importance, and 
whose nature is disputed, as in the state of the nucleus of 
the seed, respecting which there is no difference of opinion ; 
and where the plurality of embryos, or at least the ex- 
istence and regular arrangement of the cells in which they 
are formed, is the uniform structure in the family. 
The second view suggested, in which the anthera in 
Cycadese is considered as producing on its surface an in- 
definite number of pollen masses, each enclosed in its 
proper membrane, would derive its only support from a 
few remote analogies : as from those antherae, whose loculi 
are sub-divided into a definite, or more rarely an indefinite, 
number of cells, and especially from the structure of the 
stamina of Viscum album. 
I may remark, that the opinion of M. Richard who 
considers these grains, or masses, as unilocular antherae, 
each of which constitutes a male flower, seems, to be at- 
tended with nearly equal difficulties. 
The analogy between the male and female organs in 
Coniferae, the existence of an open ovarium being assumed, 
is at first sight more apparent than in Cycadeae. In Coniferae, 
however, the pollen is certainly not naked, but is enclosed in 
a membrane similar to the lobe of an ordinary anthera. 
And in those genera in which each squama of the amentum 
produces two marginal lobes only, as Pinus, Podocarpus, 
Dacrydium, Salisburia, and Phyllocladus, it nearly resembles 
the more general form of the anther® in other Phaenogamous 
* Diet. Class. d'Hist. Nat. torn. v. p. 216 . 
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