WILHELM HOFMEISTER. 
295 
monly vivacious face; he was always bubbling over with activity 
and ever showed great kindness toward his pupils. 
When I became acquainted with him in 1873 he had, of course, 
passed the zenith of his power. Aside from the almost super¬ 
human amount of work which he had done during the previous 
thirty years, it was the severe misfortune which overtook his 
family which broke him down. In the course of a few years he 
lost his wife and two matured sons from tuberculosis. He him¬ 
self in May, 1876, survived a stroke of apoplexy which compelled 
him to resign his office, and to remove to Leipzig where he died 
on the twelfth of January, 1877. 
I will now endeavor, with all brevity, to point out the signi¬ 
ficance of his scientific activity. The best known of all is Hof- 
meister’s brilliant contribution which demonstrated the homologies 
which exist between the Phanerogamae and the Cryptogamae. 
At the middle of the last century botanists considered these two 
groups as widely separated divisions of the plant kingdom, and 
had as yet no idea of the relationship between mosses and ferns, 
Pteridophyta and Gymnospermae. Indeed long after Hof- 
meister’s views had become known, the English systematists still 
placed the Gymnospermae close to the Dicotyledonae. It was re¬ 
served for Hofmeister, in his “ Vergleichende Untersuchungen” 
(1851) to develop the proof that there occurs an alternation of 
generations in all the Archegoniatae, that the sporogonium of the 
mosses is the homologue of the fern plant proper, that the repro¬ 
duction of the Gymnospermae and the Angiospermae relates itself 
immediately with that of the heterosporous Pteridophyta, and that 
in the former the alternation of generations is masked by the 
formation of the seed. 
This is, in very truth, the greatest discovery that has ever been 
made in the realm of plant morphology and taxonomy. It was 
expressed by Hofmeister in short every-day words without the 
introduction of new terms, quite in contrast with the long-drawn- 
out fashion with which many botanists now-a-days bore their 
readers. How penetrating Hofmeister’s thought was is shown 
by the fact that he held it as not only possible but probable, that 
sperm cells would be found to occur in the Gymnospermae, and 
