Ethel Sargant. 125 
to each leafy shoot. These spread about at various angles to the 
vertical. The other kind—of which I have only seen one (in one 
instance two) to one leafy shoot—is much stouter and descends 
vertically into the soil. It appears almost like a prolongation of 
the ascending shoot to which it is directly attached by a very broad 
basis.” These stout roots—which were found to be polyarch and 
which were compared with certain Crocus roots which are externally 
similar—are probably contractile, but it would be necessary to 
collect material later in the season in order to determine this point 
with certainty. 
Many years ago Ethel Sargant had an idea—which she was never 
able to carry out—for field work of a type which might even to-day 
be well worth pursuing. “ I have long had plans,” she wrote, “ for 
systematic work as to the conditions of life of native plants in their 
wild state—what determines the extinction or survival of a species 
in a particular locality and particularly the mode of reproduction 
which actually operates. How far are perennials reproduced by 
seed for example ? The Arum business first attracted my attention 
to this question, and little work has been done on it systematically. 
Perhaps we might find England almost an unexplored country from 
this point of view ! ” 
In addition to having formed the basis for Ethel Sargant’s 
study of the bionomics of Monocotyledons, the Arum maculatum 
paper was of importance in another connexion, since it initiated the 
comparative work on seedlings, begun at Dr. Scott’s suggestion, 
which was, later on, to present such remarkable developments. 
Ethel Sargant had, as we have already mentioned, been impressed 
at a very early stage by the historical importance of the vascular 
system of flowers, and had begun to work at this subject in 1889. 
Twenty-eight years later, only three months before her death, in a 
letterto the present writer,she reaffirmed in fulness of experience her 
consideredopinion regarding the value of the vascularsystem asgiving 
indications of ancestral history. In her own words, “ For a long 
time—much longer really than dating from my seedling work—I have 
looked on the number and arrangement of vascular bundles within 
a member—axial or lateral—as a useful guide to descent. Being 
interpreted, that conviction of course means that such characters are 
slow to alter and therefore often betray ancestry. But if I try to 
recollect the evidence on which that belief is founded, I can’t be 
sure of much exclusive of experience in seedlings. And of course . .. 
the exceptions even there are so numerous and so puzzling that any 
