The Relation of Fungi to Other Plants 
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 algze—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 
Moss (Dicranum scoparium) (natural size) 
White mould on dead 
fly 
