Recent Work on the Results of Fertilization 
in Angiosperms. 
BY 
ETHEL SARGANT. 
T HE main conclusions drawn by Nawaschin (6) from his 
recent researches on the fertilization of Lilium Mar - 
tagon and Fritillaria tenella were published in Russia more 
than two years ago. They were first brought to the notice 
of most European botanists by a paragraph in the Botanisches 
Centralblatt of January 4, 1899 (6), and this was shortly 
followed by the publication of similar results by Guignard ( 3 ). 
These results, obtained by independent observations on 
material almost identical, formed the most complete and 
striking confirmation of Nawaschin’s work. Both botanists 
had examined the embryo-sac of Lilium Mar tagon —the 
classic ground for such observations—and both had come to 
the startling conclusion, with which we are now familiar, that 
the pollen-tube sets two generative nuclei free in the embryo- 
sac, one of which fuses with the nucleus of the egg-cell, the 
other with that which we are accustomed to call the definitive 
nucleus of the embryo-sac. This definitive nucleus is itself 
a compound structure, formed by the fusion of the polar 
nuclei. In Lilium Mar tagon the generative nucleus some¬ 
times reaches the polar nuclei before they have met, some¬ 
times afterwards, but in either case the nuclear fusion in the 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XIV. No. LVI. December, 1900.J 
ZZ 2 
