344 
Notes. 
were quite unwarranted in giving it a new specific name until they had 
cultivated it, especially as they knew of my work and pointed out the 
resemblances between their form and mine. They could not cultivate 
it by ordinary bacteriological methods, and were puzzled by the 
specimens being contaminated with a yeast. They do not seem to 
have tried anaerobic cultures, or to have really looked closely into 
my work ; otherwise I cannot help thinking they would at least have 
tested the resemblances, amounting to identity as far as can be 
seen, to B. vermiforme. 
My own impression is that their form was a case of wild Ginger-beer 
plant. 
H. MARSHALL WARD. 
SPEBMATOZOIDS TN GYMHOSPERMS. -At the request 
of Dr. D. H. Scott, one of the editors of this Journal, we publish 
here in the English language a short resume concerning the sper- 
matozoids of Ginkgo biloba and Cycas revoluta, which we have 
lately discovered. 
In Ginkgo , as well as in Cycas , the behaviour of the pollen-tube 
towards the archegonium is quite different from what we observe in 
all the Conifers investigated by Professor Strasburger and others. For 
the growing end of the tube, instead of elongating towards the neck- 
cells of the female organ, points towards the opposite direction, and 
produces in the nucellus, which is now a paper-like thin skin, many 
slender branches, which, acting like a root, serve to maintain the tube 
in that place. The other end of the tube, which is easily recognized 
as such by the remains of the exine covering it, produces within it, 
shortly before fertilization, two generative cells, each with a spermatic 
nucleus. Then an especially interesting phenomenon takes place, 
for here each of these cells begins to be metamorphosed into 
a spermatozoid. 
The motion of the spermatozoid after its having broken out of the 
pollen-tube has been observed in Ginkgo ; as to Cycas, however, its 
motion has not yet actually been observed ; but the form as well as 
the development are so alike in both that now there is no reason to 
deny its motility. (As one of us has found that the fertilization in 
Cycas takes place at the end of September or the beginning of 
October, he intends in this year to prove its actual motility.) 
The spermatozoid of Ginkgo is considerably larger than that of any 
