to enable the logistics of having to distinguish each develop-mental stage from the thousands of germinating seeds in this research, the diameters of the seeds, embryos and protocorms ateach clear developmental stage, as defined above, were measured(see Fig. 1 for the region for diameter determination) from at least 30 randomly selected samples of each developmental stage in each species. Consequently, the size boundaries for each developmental stage for both species were established and then used to identify and count germinating seeds of various stages with the aid of the Image Pro-Plus 5.1 computer program in all the subsequent experiments.