A single fungus is a plant of the mushroom group and a number of these plants are called fungi. Fungus, the singular form, is pronounced fun gus but fungi, the plural form is pronounced fun  j eye. This unusual word has an unusual history. Its parent is a Latin word for mushroom, its grandparent is an old Greek word for sponge.

The plant world is classified into large groups called phyla, ranging from the simplest to the most highly developed. The ten simplest phyla are called thallophytes, meaning sprout plants, and the fungi have a thallophyte phylum all to themselves. A thallophyte has no true roots, stems, leaves or flowers. The pale and ghostly fungi are also without chlorophyll, the green stuff which other plants use to make their food from air, water and sunlight.

The fungi experts are called mycologists and so far they have named some 75,000 different plants of their favorite phylum   but this is by no means all of them. The giant fungus is the puffball, maybe two feet wide. Mushrooms, toadstools and truffles are medium sized, but the vast majority of fungi are too small for our eyes to see as individual plants„

These midgets are the molds and mildews, the rusts and smuts, the yeasts and a teeming hole of one celled plants that live in the soil, in water and in the air. These often grow in colonies where we can see them as a blurry patch of pale color.

Since they cannot manufacture their own food, the fungi plants must be spoon fed. They depend upon prefabricated formulae which have been prepared by other plants. The mushroom often grows in a fairy ring in the rich soil formed from a rotting tree stump. Bract fungi grow on tree trunks like clay colored shells.

Others grow in organic soil where waste materials from plants and animals are decaying into chemicals they can use.

The basic plant of the typical fungi, such as the mushroom, is a mesh of fleshy threads called the mycelium. It is buried in rich soil and the stubby umbrellas which poke above ground are merely the fruiting bodies, The truffle does not even send a fruiting body above the surface. Most fungi multiply by dusty spores which usually are carried by the wind. Many of the single celled fungi multiply by cell budding, but even many of these also can develop spores.

In the huge fungi phylum, we have friends and enemies. Mushrooms and truffles are food items, the tiny yeasts make vinegar and other food items including our daily bread. Penicillin and other midget fungi are valuable medicines. Other midget fungi are pests such as the molds anal mildews. Some, like the smuts and rusts, attack the cells of living plants and animals. Ringworm and athletes foot are two of many diseases caused by fungi.