444 Solms-Laubcich. — On the Fructification 
over sections of this kind can hardly be made at all where the 
material is so scanty, for they involve a very considerable ex- 
penditure of the same. I have at my disposal only one such 
slice of very moderate character. The account which follows 
has therefore been obtained by combining together a multitude 
of very defective pictures with inexact orientation, and I regret 
that I cannot now reproduce the material on which it rests in 
the form of figures, or can do so only to a very limited extent ; 
but various attempts to draw or photograph these objects have 
had no satisfactory result. Still I believe that very thorough 
study of all the preparations, at least a dozen times during five 
or six years, has carried me as far as it is at present possible 
to go. Examination of the original preparations deposited in 
the British Museum and in the Museum at Kew will enable 
every one to judge for himself how far the following statements 
are to be trusted. 
The process, then, of which we have been speaking is in the 
lower half almost as broad as the seed itself, but narrows rather 
suddenly above that point, and assumes the form of a thin 
cylinder, which increases slightly in breadth and terminates in 
a valley-like depression in the surface of the spadix (PI. XXVI, 
Fig. io). Its form has been given in my earlier diagrammatic 
drawing, and is not open to any doubt. In the lower broader 
portion the testa is very thick, and seems to inclose the conical 
prolongation of the ‘ nucular membrane/ which has been 
already mentioned. But this is just the most obscure and 
doubtful point in the whole matter. The before-mentioned 
enlargement of the testa appears to be essentially due to the 
middle stratum, which consists in this part of several layers, 
and loses the palisade-arrangement of its cells. The outer 
and the inner strata are similarly preserved ; the latter, in a 
preparation in the Kew Museum, being evidently formed of 
several layers of thin-walled cells. 
At the spot where the neck of the seed begins to narrow 
into the slender cylinder, the hard middle stratum of the testa 
thins out and disappears, and the further continuation contains 
only delicate tissue and is solid on the transverse section, the 
