Ethel Sargant. 121 
Besides there is much choice in biological work, and a great field 
for the philosophical naturalist, and I have always felt a sense of 
beauty a most essential faculty for the biologist.” 
Ethel Sargant’s own botanical research was concerned with 
two widely separated branches—Cytology and Anatomical 
Morphology. Her studies on the Cell, though admirable of their kind, 
scarcely revealed her powers so fully as the morphological work, in 
which she entirely “found herself,” and to which the greater part of 
her writings relate. Her first research in Cytology was directed 
to the question of whether centrosomes exist in the higher plants 
—a problem which excited keen interest in the early nineties of the 
lastcentury. Thisgave rise to no published results, but paved the way 
for a general study of oogenesis and spermatogenesis in Lilium 
Martagon, from which she drew the conclusion that there was no 
evidence, in the heterotype and homotype divisions, of the “ trans¬ 
verse fission ” postulated by Haecker. At this time there was 
considerable doubt as to the nature of the “synapsis” stage—certain 
cytologists holding it to be an artefact, due to the action of the 
reagents employed. By examining, under the immersion lens, thin 
sections of freshanthers of the Turk’s Cap Lily, mounted in the 
plant’s own sap, Ethel Sargant succeeded in demonstrating the 
existence of the synaptic phase in living cells, thus settling this 
critical question once and for all. 
In 1897—the year in which the second of her papers on 
Lilium Martagon appeared—Ethel Sargant visited various Continen¬ 
tal laboratories in company with Professor Margaret Benson. At 
Bonn she had a memorable meeting with Strasburger, with whom 
she had previously corresponded. In a letter soon after her return 
she wrote, “ He is a very highly wrought man, nervous, unbalanced 
but he impresses one as a genius. 1 shouldn’t think his influence 
altogether good on his pupils—he dominates the whole place and 
they learn to think that the cell can only be studied in the Bonn 
laboratory. ‘ But, Sir, he is a very great man,’ as Johnson said 
of Goldsmith. We conversed in French .... and I had to 
beat my French out very thin to make it cover the ground. But by 
hook or by crook the thing was done, aud it is something to look 
back on all one’s life.” 
In 1899 the work of Nawaschin and Guignard on “double 
fertilisation ” became known to English botanists. The accounts 
of these discoveries led Ethel Sargant to look again at a few hand 
sections of fertilised ovules of Lilium Martagon, which had been 
