Indeed, long prior to this time, dating from that of even the earliest workers with the microscope, it was known that the water of pools and ditches, and especially infusions of plants and animals of all kinds, teem with living organisms, but it was not recognised definitely that vast numbers of these microscopic living beings (and even actively moving ones) are plants, growing on and in the various solid and liquid matters examined, and as truly as visible and accepted plants grow on soil and in the air and water. Perhaps the most important discovery in the history of cryptogamic botany was initiated here. The change, then, that has come over our knowledge of microscopic plant life during this last busy quarter of a century has been almost entirely due to the initiation and improvement, first in methods of growing them, and in the methods of “_Microscopic Gardening_”; and secondly, to the greater knowledge gained in the use of the microscope. “If we look at the great groups of plants from a broad point of view, it is remarkable that the fungi and the phanerogams occupy attention on quite other grounds than do the algæ, mosses, and ferns. Algæ are especially a physiologist’s group, employed in questions on nutrition, reproduction, and cell division and growth; the Bryophyta and Pteridophyta are, on the other hand, the domain of the morphologist. Fungi and Phanerogams, while equally or even more employed by specialists in morphology and physiology, appeal widely to general interest on the ground of utility. “It is very significant that a group like the fungi should have attracted so much scientific attention, and aroused so general an interest at the same time. But the fact that fungi affect our lives directly has been driven home; and whether as poisons or foods, destructive moulds or fermentation agents, parasitic mildews or disease germs, they occupy more interest than all other cryptogams put together, the flowering plants alone rivalling them in this respect. A marked feature of the period in which we live will be the great advances made in our knowledge of the uses of plants, for, of course, this development of economic botany has gone hand in hand with the progress of geological botany, the extension of our planting, and the useful applications of botany to the processes of home industries.”[49]