92 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
the cytoplasm. Strasburger does not specifically describe this 
as a starch-containing region, but judging from the similarity 
between the appearance of this region and that of what is un¬ 
doubtedly ihe starch-bearing region of M. quadrifolia 13 de¬ 
scribed by him as “eine einseitige Verdichtung im Zytoplasma”, 
it is probable that it is the same in M. elata . Occasionally 
abundant polar radiations extend from the poles to the cyto¬ 
plasm on the side of the spindle away from the nucleus, and 
there may be a pronounced crossing of these radiations in the 
equatorial region. This crossing necessarily occurs near 
the surface of the starch mass (the fibers apparently in 
general do not extend into the region occupied by the 
starch grains), and is especially conspicuous when the sec¬ 
tion is such that the greater part of the starch mass 
is cut away, or when the starch is but faintly stained. In the 
cell represented in Figure 5, the greater part of the starch lies 
beneath the plane of the drawing. The poles of the spindle, 
or, perhaps more accurately, the apices of the cones of fibers, 
usually do not lie in contact with the plasma membrane, but 
a short distance inside of it. Occasionally dense aggregations 
appear in the cytoplasm about the poles, at times also a deeply 
staining granule is found there; however, there seems to be 
nothing constant in these formations, which apparently occur 
just as frequently elsewhere in the cell as at the apices of the 
fibrous cones. The left hand cell in Figure 6 shows at the up¬ 
per side such a granule which closely simulates a central body 
with a hyaline zone and a dense aggregation of cytoplasm at its 
periphery, such as is common in animal cells. In the prepara¬ 
tion, this is, if anything, even more striking than in the draw¬ 
ing. As the figure shows, however, this formation in this case 
seems to be quite independent of the two groups of spindle 
fibers which have developed, a fact which alone takes it out of 
the category of the central bodies as they are known in the 
lower plant and animal cells—unless, indeed, these groups of 
fibers should not be the beginning of the spindle figure, a pos¬ 
sibility for which, as will be seen later, there is some evidence. 
S3 Ibid., Pigs. 60 and 61. 
