Abstract
This chapter highlights characteristics of plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. For a long time green plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses were all treated as plants. Because they are most familiar to everyone, and because they are the basis of almost all life, we shall start with a study of the variety of plants. Apart from some algae the simplest land plants of today are mosses and liverworts. The first land plants to have evolved may have been like them, but there is no fossil evidence for this. The successful colonization of the land depended on the development of conducting tissues—vascular tissues. The first vascular plants were dispersed by means of spores. Spores are unicellular reproductive bodies. Fungi are saprophytic and parasitic organisms in which the body usually consists of a system of branched threads. Most of the threads are concerned with nutrition and are buried in the living or dead organic material on which the fungus is feeding.
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