122 Ethel Sargant. 
cut some years before, but scarcely glanced at; the re-examination 
showed that these slides perfectly displayed both the fertilisation of 
the egg and the “ triple fusion ” of the second male nucleus with 
the two polar nuclei. These preparations were shown at a meeting 
of the Royal Society, and elsewhere, and served to convince 
botanists in this country of the accuracy of the observations made 
by Nawaschin and Guignard. In a letter dating from this juncture, 
Ethel Sargant wrote—somewhat ruefully—“ I missed a splendid 
chance four years ago, and all this fuss comes to writing myself 
down an Ass in large gold letters.” But though she did not achieve 
priority of discovery, her work came to fruition in a later paper on 
the Results of Fertilisation in Angiosperms, In this discussion she 
propounded the ingenious theory that the triple fusion in the 
embryo-sac corresponds to a second fertilisation, “spoilt” by the 
intrusion of the lower polar nucleus. The endosperm is thus, as it 
were, a monstrous embryo, degraded to the position of a short-lived 
food tissue by the presence of the redundant nuclear elements 
introduced by the lower polar nucleus. This theory is now nearly 
twenty years old, and it is greatly to be wished that some botanist, 
familiar with the recent developments in our knowledge of the 
embryo-sac, should give us a critical review of the evidence 
relating to the problem, as it stands at the present day. 
After her work on Lilium Martngon , Ethel Sargant did not 
again return to Cytology, partly because her eyes were not strong 
enough for continuous work with high powers. But she closely 
watched the progress of the subject and marked, with some distress, 
the tendency—which became particularly rife in the first decade 
of this century—to obscure cytological issues by presenting the 
facts coloured beyond recognition by some preconceived theory; as 
she wrote in 1905, “ I am feeling moved to write a Cytology as a 
protest against the confusion of observation with induction.” 
While Ethel Sargant was pursuing her cytological work, she 
was at the same time developing a line of thought which was 
destined to find its ultimate expression in that study of seedlings 
with which her name is chiefly associated. Immediately after she 
went down from Girton, she began to read Hegelmaier’s work on 
Vegetable Embryology, and the notes which she made at the time 
show how deeply she was impressed with the subject. These notes 
form, as it were, the germ out of which her Presidential Address 
(Brit. Ass., Sect. K, 1913) was to develop nearly thirty years later. 
In 1889 and 1890 she made her first attempts at research, examining 
