The hybridiser grows his cereals, etc., in pots until ready for crossing, and then takes them into the laboratory, removes the weaker spikelets, and takes out the young stamens from the flowers left on the plant. The female plant is then ready, and the flowers covered with paper caps. The pollen, obtained by a clean wet brush from the plant chosen as the father, is then carefully placed in position on the stigmas, and the caps replaced. The pollination is repeated occasionally, and care taken that no uncrossed flowers develop later. In this way a few seeds or grains are got to start with. This would be the place to introduce an account of the enormous advances made by the botanists of the last decade or two in the study of the microscopic phenomena of fertilisation. Without going into details--which would more than occupy all the space at command--I may recall the discoveries of Strasburger and his pupils, and of Guignard, which have supplemented the earlier discoveries of De Bary, Cohn, and Hofmeister, by establishing the facts that the essential point in fertilisation is the fusion of two nuclei, and the bringing together in the fused mass of two extremely minute thread-like coiled bodies, the so-called chromatosomes or filaments, one of which is derived from the male and the other from the female parent. The particulars as to the marvellous adaptations to secure the union of these two infinitesimally minute threads, their behaviour immediately before and after union, and many other points must be passed over, as I have only space to emphasise the one crowning discovery that these tiny filaments of nuclear substance are the material carriers of all the hereditary properties of the parents to the young plant which their union initiates. It must not be supposed that the above statements are based on any meagre foundation of facts. The attraction of the fusing nucleated masses had been demonstrated over and over again by Tulasne, De Bary, Strasburger and others; but Pfeffer brought the matter to a crisis by discovering the attractive (chemotactic) substance emitted in given cases, and by collecting the fertilising bodies by its means into artificial tubes. The fusion of the nucleated bodies in the sexual act was observed by Strasburger in the living plant a few years ago, and numerous later observers have confirmed it. Meanwhile all the stages of approach and contact of the essential filaments of the nuclear substance have been traced, as also all the stages of the transference of half of each filament, male and female, into each of the first two cells of the very young embryo-plant.