The Relation of Fungi to Other Plants 



Moss {Dicrantim scoparitwi) (natural size) 



being forced to a change of form which will better suit their 

 changed surroundings. 



The novice sees nothing in the brown, or even in the highly 



coloured, fungi to war- 

 rant his calling them 

 plants. They are to him 

 "just toadstools ;" for 

 green colouring matter 

 — his first criterion for 

 plants — is not there, and, 

 moreover, there is noth- 

 ing in their shape which 

 suggests to him the 

 plants with which he is 

 familiar. The snow- 

 white Indian pipe lacks 

 the green of most plants, 

 but that does not rule it 

 for him out of the plant 

 world ; for although it 

 is colourless, and depends upon other plants for food, still it 

 has a flower form and produces a seed-box with well-devel- 

 oped seeds. Fungi, however, to any but the close student 

 must seem quite unrelated to all normal plant forms. But the 

 botanist, by a study of their structure, finds 

 that they all grow from microscopic, dust- 

 like particles, which differ from true seeds in 

 consisting of but one or a few cells, and in 

 having no embryo plant in them as true 

 seeds have. He recognises their position in 

 the kingdom of living things, and classes 

 them as spore-bearing plants, lower than 

 the group of mosses, those dainty plants 

 which delight every one with their graceful- 

 ness, and which bear their spores in tiny cap- 

 sules or boxes set up on slender stems. By studying their life 

 history he decides that they are degenerate members of the low- 

 est group — the algse — and that they have fostered the habit of 

 feeding on material constructed by green plants, instead of con- 

 structing food material for themselves, and have, in consequence, 



8 



White mould on dead 

 fly 



