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Ethel Sargant. 
central idea which was soon to develop into her theory of the 
geophilous origin of Monocotyledons, “ 1 am inclined to think,” 
she wrote, “ that the habit of a stem shortened to a mere root- 
stock or tuber or bulb is what originally differentiated the Mono¬ 
cotyledons and I suspect that the specialization of the cotyledon(s) 
as a sucking organ chiefly, is bound up with this, but all this is 
rather inchoate as yet.” 
It would lead us too far to attempt to trace the history of the 
reception of Ethel Sargant’s theory of the origin of Monocotyledons, 
which was fully developed in the papers numbered 11, 13 and 15, 
in the accompanying list of her memoirs. But it may he worth 
mentioning that so acute a thinker as the late Professor Ldo Errera 
of Brussels, gave the hypothesis his immediate adhesion. On 
receiving the New Phytologist paper of 1902 he wrote, “ It 
appears to me to throw really the first ray of light on the obscure 
phylogeny of Angiosperms.” The temptation to discuss and 
analyse the theory must be resisted for lack of space ; it is, indeed, 
scarcely necessary to deal with it in detail, since it is fully and 
lucidly explained in the papers cited, and the criticism to which it 
has been subjected is also well-known to botanists. 
The fact that Ethel Sargant was President of the Botanical 
Section at the Meeting, of the British Association in 1913, had a 
definite value in her scientific life, since it gave her the necessary 
incentive for writing a critical summary of the rise and progress of 
botanical embryology, including in this term the study of seedlings 
—a laborious task which, without this stimulus, she might never 
have attempted. Her discussion will remain as conspicuous a 
landmark for the subject as Hanstein’s work of 1870, from which 
she dated her review. It was entirely characteristic of her that 
she brought the Address to a close with certain lines from Milton. 
Her sympathies in poetry, leaned essentially to the grand 
style and the large manner ; she was at home in regions 
swept by an air “ not dim from human hearth-fires.” Her 
spacious nature gave forth chords answering to Milton’s music— 
even, indeed, to the height of his great argument. 
A. A. 
