1528. Automatic movements, as in the leaves and stamina of the higher plants, scarcely occur in them, or at most in the ferns, from their possessing spiral vessels. They divide, according to the tissues, into three classes, into Cell-, Vessel-, and Trachea-plants.
CLASS I.
Cell-plants—Fungi.
Here belong those plants which consist simply of cellular tissue, having no sap-tubes and tracheæ. Such plants, too, possess no regular or hexagonal cellular tissue.
1529. The cellular tissue, in which there is only a single active process, cannot essentially alter its primary form. It is therefore an accumulation of round or cylindrical mucus-vesicles.
1530. Mucus-vesicles, in which the air-process is not as yet active, cannot be coloured green; but must have the colour of the earth.
1531. Plants, composed of amorphous and earth-coloured cellular tissue, are Fungi. The fungi are simply clusters of mucus-vesicles joined together in a more or less regular manner, their union being effected in dark, hollow and wet situations.
1532. They may therefore originate wherever mucous juices are evolved by the potential agency of a higher organization, and thus by putrefaction. The fungi originate by æquivocal generation. They are the anal-organizations of the higher plants and animals; the corrupted and luxuriating juices.
1533. Nevertheless the fungus is propagated by division of its vesicles, which again, in accordance with their peculiar laws of polarity, attract mucus-vesicles, and thus obtain the form of the earlier or parent fungus. This is only a more regulated kind of æquivocal generation.
1534. The origin of the fungi may therefore happen in a twofold manner, namely, by formation from other juices, and by that of their own, which is called propagation. Still at bottom both are one in kind.