108 LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
recently advocated by Vines,* in distinguishing two kinds 
of spores, sexual and asexual. 
To my mind much of the virtue of such critical surveys 
is lost in the semi-conservative tendency of the proposed 
alterations. In the following remarks I have endeavoured 
to make a few suggestions, which, without being dogmatic, 
I think afford an indication of the form which this much 
needed revision in terminology must take. 
In the first place, I would suggest that similar struc- 
tures in plants and in animals should in all cases be 
known by the same names, and that these names should 
be retained throughout. Alternation of generations, with 
its curious phenomena of sexual and asexual organisms, 
occurs both amongst plants and amongst animals, although 
it is among the former that it attains its greatest impor- 
tance. The medusoid with its reproductive organs is 
exactly comparable to the thallus of a fern or of a moss 
with its so-called antheria and archegonia. Indeed the 
comparatively higher organisation of the medusoid over 
the hydrozoon, 1s further paralleled by the correspondingly 
higher development of the moss-thallus over its parasitic 
asexual progeny. In botanical terminology two new 
names have been lately introduced to distinguish the 
sexual from the asexual generation, namely ‘“‘oophyte’”’ 
and ‘‘sporophyte.’’ ‘The former term I do not think can 
be looked on as perfectly satisfactory ; for ‘‘oophyte”’ is 
applicable only to a thallus bearing female reproductive 
organs. Gamophyte, on the other hand, would, I think, 
be applicable to a male, a female, or a hermaphrodite 
thallus. | 
Generally speaking, we may say that the vast majority 
of plants and animals, at some period of their existence, 
develope two kinds of sexual cells, male and female. In 
* Physiology of Plants, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1886. 
