TERMINOLOGY OF REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS IN PLANTS. 107 
of reproduction in the higher plants. The very names 
‘“‘Phanerogamia’”’ and “‘ Cryptogamia,”’ given to the higher 
and lower plants respectively, implied an entirely false 
conception of the nature of the parts on which that termi- 
nology was based. 
Despite the great progress which has been made within 
the past few years by Hofmeister, Sachs, Goebel and 
others, the terminology of Botany leaves yet much to be 
desired.* Many old terms have, it is true, disappeared, but 
there are many more still which show no signs of yielding 
up the places they have so long occupied; whilst the 
introduction of a host of new terms, often bearing a strong 
mimetic resemblance to their predecessors, has tended to 
produce rather confusion than lucidity. 
There have not been wanting critics who, foreseeing the 
difficulties in the way of obtaining clear notions of great 
morphological or etiological problems with the clumsy and 
often misleading terminology in use, have made an effort 
to reduce the chaos to something like order. But what 
botanists like Murray and Bennett achieved in this line, 
for example, in the use of the term ‘‘spore,’’ has just as 
often been undone by the adoption of views like those 
* «The task of explaining the connection between the several groups has 
been rendered difficult by the present state of the terminology, which is one of 
transition. We may hope, however, that the terminology will soon be greatly 
simplified and cleared up by applying the acknowledged homologies. . . .”— 
Goebel, Outlines of Classification and Special Morphology of Plants, p. 7. 
Clarendon Press, 1887. 
‘‘The sexual organs are male and female; the male organs produce 
zoosperms (antherozoids), the female organs oospheres. In the present state 
of science it would therefore be the simplest and most accurate plan to denote 
all male organs spermogonia and all female organs oogonia, in contrast to the 
sporangia which produces asexual reproductive cell-spores.”—Sachs, Lectures 
on the Physiology of Plants, p. 742. Clarendon Press, 1887. 
+ A Reformed System of Terminology of the Reproductive Organs of the 
Thallophyta. Q. J. M.S., vol. xx, 
