The female cell is entrusted with procuring and storing the material necessary to the building up of the embryo; and its peculiarities depend chiefly on this. [Illustration: FIG. 69. Ovum of the Sea-urchin, _Toxopneustes lividus_, after Wilson. _zk_, cell-body. _k_, nucleus or so-called 'germinal vesicle,' _n_, nucleolus or so-called 'germinal spot.' Below there is a spermatozoon of the same animal, with the same magnification (750 times).] It is true that in plants this stored material is seldom considerable, and that is because the ovum so frequently remains even after fertilization within the living tissues of the plant, and is thence supplied, often very abundantly, with food-stuffs; and, moreover, because the young plant that springs from the fertilized ovum maybe very small and simple, and yet capable of immediately procuring its own nourishment. But there are exceptions to this; thus the ova of the brown sea-wracks, or Fucaceæ, for instance, are quite twenty times as large as the ordinary cells of the algæ (Fig. 64), and contain a quantity of food-stuff within themselves. In this case the ova are liberated into the water even before fertilization, and the nutrition of the embryo from the mother-plant is excluded. In these Algæ we meet, for the first time, with a special organ in which the ova arise. In animals this is much more generally the case, and from sponges upwards there are always quite definite parts and tissues of the body which are alone able to develop eggs, and these are usually well-defined organs of special structure, the ovaries. Similarly, in male animals the spermatozoa arise in special places, and usually in special organs, the spermaries or testes. Animal ova often consist of more than the simple cell-body, the protoplasm and its nucleus; they almost always contain in the cell-body a so-called 'Deutoplasm,' as Van Beneden has fittingly named the yolk-substance. This consists of fats, carbohydrates, or albuminoids, which often lie in the cell-body in the form of spherules, flakes, or grains--a nutritive material that is often surrounded and enclosed by a small quantity of living matter or formative protoplasm. Apart from these stores of yolk it would be impossible for a young animal to develop from the ovum of a snake or a bird, for such highly differentiated animals could not be formed from an egg of microscopic dimensions if this remained without some supply of food from outside of itself during the period of development. There is obviously need for a considerable amount of building material, so that all the organs and parts, which are composed of thousands and millions of cells, may be developed.