and Magazine of Natural History, in November of the same year, he speaks much more guardedly. "These researches are in the highest degree curious, and if the facts related prove to be correct, most importantly affect the received views of analogies in the generative processes of plants."
At the same time Henfrey says he hopes to speak more definitely on this matter when his own investigations are complete. Two years later his own very careful work in the same field was laid before the Linnean Society, in which he corroborated the main facts that had come to light. Turning once again to the paper of Suminski, after making certain criticisms of detail, Henfrey handsomely remarks—"Nothing however can take from him the credit of having discovered the archegonia and their import, one of the most important discoveries in physiological Botany of modern times since it has led to results revolutionising the whole theory of the reproduction of plants and opened out a totally new sphere of inquiry into the laws and relations of vegetable life."
For some little time after these discoveries the archegonia of the fern were, on the initiative of Mercklin, commonly referred to as the "organs of Suminski," a custom which happily fell into desuetude. Mercklin, in his paper, which essentially repeats the work of Suminski, states that he devoted his entire attention for three months to the fern prothalli before he succeeded in observing the entrance of a spermatozoid.
In reviewing the early papers of the Hofmeisterian epoch—papers which form the bed-rock of the existing morphology—one is struck with the marvellous rapidity with which their significance was apprehended. We find the phrase "alternation of generations" employed within two years of the discoveries of Suminski, whilst by the early fifties the general genetic relations of the vascular series were realized in quite a new light.
As Sachs puts it:—"When Darwin's theory was given to the world eight years after Hofmeister's investigations, the relations of affinity between the great divisions of the vegetable kingdom were so well established and so patent that the theory of descent had only to accept what genetic morphology had actually brought to view."
