56 TYPES OF BRITISH PLANTS 
The first class comprises most of the mischievous 
funguses, and they are all called “parasites,” a word 
which means “one who sits at table with another,” and 
of course feeds at his host’s expense. The second class, 
many of whose members are of great value to us, includes 
the yeast plant, the mushroom, and others. 
Excluding the plants of a single cell, which can only 
be distinguished from the small alge by the absence of 
chlorophyll, we may say that the typical fungus plant 
consists of long thread-like tubes, composed of a single 
row of cells, which run all about the host which it has 
adopted, whether that host be decaying leaf-mould, 
manure, jam, a caterpillar, a fly, or a living plant. These 
tubes, or filaments, are called hyphae, and sometimes they 
weave a web over the surface, and sometimes bore their 
way through and through the body nourishing them. 
These hyphe keep on branching and intertwining until 
they may form a closely-matted mass, such as you may 
see in a brick of the so-called “mushroom spawn,” which 
is really the plant itself. “But,’ you will say, “the 
mushrooms and the toadstools, the great funguses one 
may see on trees, do not look lke branching tubes at 
all.” This is true, but the great point to remember is 
that the ordinary mushroom you see in the fields is not 
the main body of the plant. That is buried beneath the 
soil, and what you gather is merely the fruit, which 
comes up in this way with the intention of scattering its 
spores in the wind. Just in the same way, the hyphe 
of the tree fungus are driving their way like ship worms 
through the timber, and though you knocked off what 
you could see, you would only destroy the year’s fruit 
and not the plant itself. 
There is, however, one group of organisms generally 
