From the concordant observations of Kowalevsky at Naples and Hatschek at Messina, it follows, firstly, that the ovum-segmentation and gastrulation of the Amphioxus are of the simplest character. They take place in the same way as we find them in many of the lower animals of different invertebrate stems, which we have already described as original or primordial; the development of the Ascidia is of the same type. Sexually mature specimens of the Amphioxus, which are found in great quantities at Messina from April or May onwards, begin as a rule to eject their sexual products in the evening; if you catch them about the middle of a warm night and put them in a glass vessel with seawater, they immediately eject through the mouth their accumulated sexual products, in consequence of the disturbance. The males give out masses of sperm, and the females discharge ova in such quantity that many of them stick to the fibrils about their mouths. Both kinds of cells pass first into the mantle-cavity after the opening of the gonads, proceed through the gill-clefts into the branchial gut, and are discharged from this through the mouth. The ova are simply round cells. They are only 1/250 of an inch in diameter, and thus are only half the size of the mammal ova, and have no distinctive features. The clear protoplasm of the mature ovum is made so turbid by the numbers of dark granules of food-yelk or deutoplasm scattered in it that it is difficult to follow the process of fecundation and the behaviour of the two nuclei during it (Chapter 1.7). The active elements of the male sperm, the cone-shaped spermatozoa, are similar to those of most other animals (cf. Figure 1.20). Fecundation takes place when these lively ciliated cells of the sperm approach the ovum, and seek to penetrate into the yelk-matter or the cellular substance of the ovum with their head-part--the thicker part of the cell that encloses the nucleus. Only one spermatozoon can bore its way into the yelk at one pole of the ovum-axis; its head or nucleus coalesces with the female nucleus, which remains after the extrusion of the directive bodies from the germinal vesicle. Thus is formed the "stem-nucleus," or the nucleus of the "stem-cell" (cytula, Figure 1.2). This now undergoes total segmentation, dividing into two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two cells, and so on. In this way we get the spherical, mulberry-shaped body, which we call the morula.