Word: fungi
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Outside the Law. The infant A.F. of L. which broke away from the Knights of Labor in 1886 was no idealistic organization. It was a business proposition-"pure and simple unionism"-set up for the economic improvement of its members. After a time that business proposition sprouted some fungi...
...began to teach a generation of botanists new conceptions of plant disease and care. He helped to found Massachusett's system of tree wardens, went about the U.S. diagnosing tree ailments, usually at a glance, and advising communities how to preserve their leanness from gas, electricity, insects, fungi, etc. A good hand with chisel and trowel, Stone devised methods of repairing trees. His teachings stimulated a host of tree surgeons and researchers, who learned to treat trees as living things...
...botanists then believed that the potato blight was caused by fungi, which were thought to grow only on dead things, never on living plants. But when the fungus was at last proved guilty, botanists opened their eyes wide. They found fungi...
...Cryptogamic-i.e., devious in sexual behavior. As late as 1875 many scientists argued that some fungi were of spontaneous generation. So tiny and evasive were the winter spores of the potato fungus that they were not identified until 1910. Further, reproduction among fungi was usually sexless, with a sexual union occurring perhaps only once in several generations...
Another line of attack against plant fungi is to develop naturally immune strains by breeding. At the turn of the century long-fibred U. S. cotton was rescued from fungus by crossbreeding with a resistant Egyptian variety; in the 1920s Louisiana sugar cane was saved by supplanting the old "noble" strains with resistant breeds. In 1937 the U. S. Bureau of Plant Industry estimated that more than one-fourth of U. S. farmlands were planted to disease-resistant crops...