The British Association at Birmingham , 343 
THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT BIRMINGHAM. 
Presidential Address. 
10R the first time in the history of the British Association, a 
_L woman was chosen as President of a Section, and in opening 
her address Miss Ethel Sargant referred to this innovation as an 
honour done to herself as a botanist and an act of generosity to her 
sex. Certainly the Section was amply rewarded by the admirable 
address in which Miss Sargant discussed “the development of 
botanical embryology since 1870”—a slightly misleading title, since 
the address was limited to Angiosperm embryology, though this is 
of course a sufficiently wide field. As was to be expected and 
desired, the President devoted a considerable portion of the address 
to the recent investigations on seedling structure and its interpre¬ 
tation, in which she has taken so large and notable a part. 
The Problems of Angiosperm Embryology. 
As pointed out by Balfour, embryology ought, strictly speaking, 
to deal with the growth and structure of organisms during their 
development within the egg-membranes before they are capable of 
leading an independent existence, but modern investigators have 
shown that such a limitation of the science would have a purely 
artificial character, and the term is now employed to cover the 
anatomy and physiology of the organism during the whole period 
between its coming into being and its attainment of the adult state. 
The older botanists used the term in its narrower sense, including 
the study of the embryo-sac and the structures contained in it before 
the formation of the unfertilised egg-cell as well as the fertilisation 
of the latter and its subsequent divisions, but they did not proceed 
beyond the resting stage of the embryo within the ripe seed. Here, 
as in Zoology, this division is arbitrary and inconvenient; hence in 
the following remarks embryology is taken to include every stage in 
the development of the plant from the first division of the fertilised 
egg-cell to maturity. 
Systematists from Caesalpino onwards have paid much attention 
to the structure of the seed, and were indeed forced to study the 
embryo because its characters are often of systematic importance. 
Botanists became familiar with the structure of the embryo in the 
ripe seed before they had traced its origin from the fertilised egg¬ 
cell, or followed its development after germination. Since the early 
history of the embryo was a sealed book to observers without the 
compound microscope, work on the external morphology of seedlings 
preceded that on the formation of the embryo. In the school of 
seedling descriptive work the greatest name is thatofThilo Irmisch 
(1815-1879), whose work was neglected by the succeeding generation 
owing to the rapid development of microscopic botany, starting from 
Hanstein’s classic work (1870) on the divisions of the fertilised egg¬ 
cell, which laid the foundation of botanical embryology in the 
narrower sense—the study of the embryo from origin to germination. 
The period in the plant’s history beginning with the first division of 
