There are two kinds of young plants - those which are produced from a seed containing an embryo, and those which come from a spore which has no embryo. Young plants start in life from various positions, those on the soil being most common. Then others utilize living trees as a starting point, either to lie there as air plants, like so many of the gorgeous orchids of tropical regions, or like the parasitic mistletoe of the temperate region; the former simply finds a resting place, the latter sends its roots down into the tissues of the supporting plant and lives upon the partly-prepared juices of the host plant.

In California there is a group much like the Mistletoe: the Phoradendrons, which expel their glutinous seeds with force enough to lodge them on the neighboring pine branches, where, held by their viscidity, they grow and send their sapsuck-ing roots down through the bark into the cambium layer of the pine.

Among lower plants, those which come from spores, were found many fungi which live on decaying or on healthy vegetable or animal matter. Among the rarer of this kind were the Torrubias, which grow out of and kill living insects or larva. Some instances of this kind were very striking. The foot disease of India is now well known to be due to attacks of a fungus much like our common bread mould. The spores of this fungus, which is very common in India, find a resting place on the skin of the human foot. They there grow deep into the flesh until this and the bones become a diseased mass, full of canals and round cavities. Even the bone is filled with round holes where the fungus flourishes until nothing but amputation above the ankle can save the sufferer's life.

Lichens grow on trees, earth and rocks. Sometimes the same species is cosmopolitan, in temperate regions. Thus growing on the trees in West Chester the lecturer found a little yellow lichen. He found the same species growing two hundred feet up in the air on the spire of the Strasburg Cathedral in Germany; and later the same species was sent to him, growing on the bleached lower-jaw bone of a human being which was found on the dreary shores of the Arctic Ocean. This the lecturer exhibited. The manner in which, from a single spore, many moss plants may be produced was next explained and illustrated.

How the ferns grew from spores into a prothal-lus, and from this, by asexual generation, the fern came, was also illustrated. The fern fed upon the prothallus out of which it grew, in a manner that called to mind the pelican, which was said to open its breast to feed the young on its own blood. The Lemna or Duckweed, a floating water plant, hardly more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, contained within the parent plant, at one time, three generations of young plants, which, toward autumn, were liberated, ready for the growth of the ensuing spring.

The whole process is readily observed by putting some fine mud in an open fruit jar, filling the jar with water, and placing it in a warm, sunny window, and then dropping a handful of the lemna in to grow.

The lecture closed by a statement showing how, from the embryo, the flowering plant started in its career of growth.