ii Obituary.—Miss Ethel Sargant , F.L.S. 
fertilization in Angiosperms. Preparations showing the twofold nuclear 
fusions were demonstrated by her to the Royal Society in May, 1899. Her 
position in this matter may be compared to that of Guignard, whose work, 
though somewhat earlier in date, was also essentially a confirmation of 
Nawaschin’s results. An interesting resume of the subject of Double 
Fertilization was given by Miss Sargant in the { Annals of Botany ’ a year 
later. 
Miss Sargant’s main lifework falls under two periods, which somewhat 
overlap. The first, already touched on, was cytological; the second, which 
occupied the remainder of her scientific career, was anatomical, her subject 
being the comparative anatomy of seedlings and the conclusions to which 
it led. The latter period was perhaps the more fertile of the two. This 
work also was started at Kew, where she began to accumulate her seed¬ 
ling material. The first publication on the subject was a joint paper, with 
Mrs. D. H. Scott, on the development of Arum maculatum from the 
seed (1898). 
Her comparative researches were widely extended and soon led to con¬ 
clusions of far-reaching importance. A new type of transition from stem to 
root in Anemarrhena (Liliaceae) was described in 1900, and this was followed 
up, two years later, by a preliminary paper on the origin of the seed-leaf in 
Monocotyledons, the first statement of her important theory. The following 
year, 1903, saw the publication of her great memoir on this subject, one of the 
most valuable of her contributions which have appeared in the ‘ Annals \ It is 
illustrated by seven plates, drawn partly by herself and partly by her friend 
Miss Agnes Robertson,nowMrs. Arber. While agreeing with Prof.G. Henslow 
and some other writers in deriving Monocotyledons from Dicotyledons, con¬ 
trary to the views of the majority of botanists up to that time, Miss Sargant 
was led to quite an original interpretation of the relations between the two 
classes. Her comparison of the seedling-structure of certain Liliaceae with 
that of Dicotyledons, which are exceptional in having a single seed-leaf, 
indicated that in the former, as well as in the latter, the one cotyledon 
represents a fused pair. The anatomical facts supporting this conclusion are 
worked out in the fullest detail. This point then, the origin of the single 
cotyledon by fusion, is the first essential of the theory. Secondly, while 
Prof. Henslow had traced the Monocotyledons to an aquatic ancestry, 
Miss Sargant explained their peculiarities of structure by the hypothesis 
that they were essentially geophilous plants, originally possessing under¬ 
ground stems, such as bulbs, corms, or rhizomes, as so many of them 
still do. 
Thus the Monocotyledons are regarded as having sprung from some 
early and simple race of Dicotyledons, by adopting, in the first instance, 
a geophilous habit. Our author was able to offer, on these lines, a satisfac¬ 
tory explanation of all the leading characters of Monocotyledons—the singlq 
