Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
History
Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
Botanists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Botany -- Great Britain -- History
The Loranthaceae was another family on which the development of the
embryo-sac and the processes of fertilisation and development of the
fruit interested Griffith specially. Not only did he send his results
home to the Linnean Society in two papers, but his descriptions and
figures of all the species described in the _Notulae_ take account of
these morphological and developmental facts. He traced the development
of the cavity of the ovary and regarded the ovules as reduced to their
simplest expression--to an "amnios" or embryo-sac. And he observed the
extension of the embryo-sacs up the style and the union of the pollen
tube with the tip of the embryo-sac. His further description of the
development of the embryo, endosperm and fruit is wonderfully exact if
we allow for his regarding the long suspensor bearing the embryo as
derived from the pollen tube growing down through the long embryo-sac.
Griffith thus recognised all the main peculiarities of _Viscum_ and of
_Loranthus_ subsequently described more in detail in European species
by Hofmeister (whose analysis of Griffith's work in 1859 is a great
testimony to its accuracy) and later by Treub in the tropical species
which had been studied by Griffith.
The Balanophoraceae was another group, on which Griffith made pioneer
investigations. He collected and examined all the species he met with,
partly from the systematic interest in supporting Robert Brown's
objection to Lindley's class of Rhizantheae, but still more from his
interest in the details of their reproduction. An examination of the
plates from his memoirs, only published after his death, in the Linnean
_Transactions_ will show how fully he was aware of the structure of the
archegonium-like female flower of _Balanophora_; of the relation of
the pollen-grains and pollen tubes to it; and of the appearance of the
endosperm which he mistook for the embryo. Throughout he compares the
structure with the pistillum (archegonium) of Bryophyta.
Thus in the Balanophoraceae also Griffith laid the foundations on which
the work of Hofmeister, and more recently that of Treub and Lotsy
follow.
When at Malacca Griffith interested himself among many other problems
in the ovule and the development of the seed of _Avicennia_. He had
previously paid attention to the viviparous embryos of other Mangroves.
This piece of work, when compared with Treub's re-examination of
_Avicennia_, brings out so clearly Griffith's accuracy, so far as his
means of observation allowed him to go, that we may look for a moment
at how these two investigations, separated by forty years, compare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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