might then be said to
exist in the essential parts of the male and female organs. The increased
development in the ovulum would not consist so much in the unusual form
and thickening of the coat, a part of secondary importance, and whose
nature is disputed, as in the state of the nucleus of the seed,
respecting which there is no difference of opinion; and where the
plurality of embryos, or at least the existence and regular arrangement
of the cells in which they are formed, is the uniform structure in the
family.

(*Footnote. Mem. de l'Acad. des Scien. de Paris 1775 page 518.)

The second view suggested, in which the anthera in Cycadeae is considered
as producing on its surface an indefinite number of pollen masses, each
enclosed in its proper membrane, would derive its only support from a few
remote analogies: as from those antherae, whose loculi are sub-divided
into a definite, or more rarely an indefinite, number of cells, and
especially from the structure of the stamina of Viscum album.

I may remark, that the opinion of M. Richard,* who considers these
grains, or masses, as unilocular antherae, each of which constitutes a
male flower, seems to be attended with nearly equal difficulties.

(*Footnote. Dict. Class. d'Hist. Nat. tome 5 page 216.)

The analogy between the male and female organs in Coniferae, the
existence of an open ovarium being assumed, is at first sight more
apparent than in Cycadeae. In Coniferae, however, the pollen is certainly
not naked, but is enclosed in a membrane similar to the lobe of an
ordinary anthera. And in those genera in which each squama of the amentum
produces two marginal lobes only, as Pinus, Podocarpus, Dacrydium,
Salisburia, and Phyllocladus, it nearly resembles the more general form
of the antherae in other Phaenogamous plants. But the difficulty occurs
in those genera which have an increased number of lobes on each squama,
as Agathis and Araucaria, where their number is considerable and
apparently indefinite, and more particularly still in Cunninghamia, or
Belis,* in which the lobes, though only three in number, agree in this
respect, as well as in insertion and direction, with the ovula. The
supposition, that in such cases all the lobes of each squama are cells of
one and the same anthera, receives but little support either from the
origin and arrangement of the lobes themselves, or from the structure of
other phaenogamous plants: the only cases of apparent, though doubtf