
174 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 

distinctly genetic character of the one is more marked than in the 
preceding case; it is brought about by the formation upon the 
branches of the vaucheria of female cells (odgonia) and male cells 
(antheridia). These grow very near to each other, and in the an- 
theridia are formed spermatozoids, while the contents of the 
odgonia are transformed into an oosphere. The oogonium and 
the antheridium open simultaneously, and the spermatozoids enter 
and are lost in the contents of the odgonium which is thus fertilized, 
giving rise again to the plant. 
The asexual mode of reproduction is quite simple, but quite 
regular. The growing end of the thallus becomes clubbed and 
filled with brown granular contents ; these shrink, becoming brown 
in colour, and force their way through the ends of the thallus, as a 
gonidium, which, on escaping, is found to be ciliated, to swim freely, 
and ultimately to settle and give rise to new plants. 
We have here a lowly plant indeed ; but, none the less, we have 
remarkably specialised function and efficient differentiation. All 
this is palpably subservient to the reproduction of the plant, its 
multiplication and continuity. How did all these complex appa- 
ratus and adaptations arise? Only by the slow operation of the 
Darwinian law-—the conservation of ever-recurrent beneficial adap- 
tations. But if the non-sequential attempts at deduction such as 
our attention has been frequently called to, could be taken as 
sound, if a Desmid, or Diatom, or a Paramecian, or a Rotifer 
may by one capricious bound, or freak of nature, be produced 
directly, and without its parental product—the egg or its equivalent 
—from the decomposing cell-contents of (say) Chara or Nitella,— 
why did nature spend what to us must appear as its truly awful 
energies on the production of processes so complex and wonderful 
as we have seen them, even in the lowly alge, to be; intended as 
they manifestly are only for the preservation and multiplication of 
the special forms? Heredity, known to be so powerful a factor in 
biological processes, would thus have no place. There can be no 
“survival of the fittest,” for the Paramzecian coming by no con- 
ceivable method out of the decomposing “ protoplasm” of an 
algee, need have no “struggle” for existence, but having done 
its little life-work, may, in decomposing, give rise thereby to—a 
Rotifer ! 
The absurdity of this position seems only to require to be shown 
to be admitted. ‘To assert it of the larger forms of life would to 
the least observant be to excite a smile. No one supposes that a 
grasshopper’s egg will give rise to a “painted lady,” or that the 
decaying sheep upon the moor, because there is life upon it, has 
had the life that it has, as an organism, lost, transformed directly 
and without the intervention of other life-forms into the living 
things it harbours and sustains. No; it is only because we are 

