Groups into Which Plants Naturally Fall 453 



stools, though it is not yet certainly known what the significance 

 of these colors may be. The reproduction of the Fungi is multi- 

 farious, but most commonly by tiny spores; and these are spread 

 by the wind with the dust, of which they make up no inconsider- 

 able part. These dust-like spores can be seen en masse by the 

 reader if he will place a fresh mushroom, gills down, on some paper; 

 for after a few hours a striking spore-print of the gills will appear. 

 Spores, furthermore, are often of a thick-walled "resting" sort, 

 which can endure dryness, heat, light, and other unfavorable 

 conditions for months or even years; and this fact helps to explain 

 why those particular plants are so ubiquitous and irrepressible. 

 But they also reproduce sexually, at least some of them do, and 

 usually by methods so closely like those of the Algae as to suggest 

 a relationship between these two groups. This, indeed, is a con- 

 clusion sustained by abundance of evidence; and it all goes to 

 show that the Fungi are really nothing other than Algae which 

 have taken to a parasitic habit of life. 



With the Fungi are commonly reckoned some plants which are 

 fungus-like, but not Fungi. Thus the Dodder, and the Indian 

 Pipe are Flowering Plants, though they have no chlorophyll or 

 leaves, and present a markedly fungus-like aspect hi correlation 

 with the parasitic or saprophytic habit they have assumed. And 

 there are many other flowering parasites hi all degrees of develop- 

 ment of the habit, as witness the Mistletoe, which is only a part- 

 parasite, a kind of a natural graft which takes water and minerals 

 from its host, but makes its own food by means of its own chloro- 

 phyll. Such plants can always be told by then- flowers, which 

 they bear at some time in their lives, and which, of course, are 

 wholly absent from the Fungi. 



However ignoble the habit of the Fungi may appear from the 

 view-point of green plants at whose expense they exist, their 

 manner of life has been a success; for it has enabled them to 

 develop no less than some sixty-six thousand different kinds al- 

 ready known and described by Botanists (between four and five 



