Cormophytes (Cormophyta) is a historical term seldom used today for the plants that are differentiated into roots, stems and

leaves A leaf (: leaves) is a principal appendage of the stem of a vascular plant, usually borne laterally above ground and specialized for photosynthesis. Leaves are collectively called foliage, as in "autumn foliage", while the leaves, stem, ...

. These

plant Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...

s differ from

thallophyte Thallophytes (Thallophyta or Thallobionta) are a polyphyletic group of non-motile organisms traditionally described as "thalloid plants", "relatively simple plants" or " lower plants". They form a division of kingdom Plantae that include lichens ...

s, whose body is referred to as the

thallus Thallus (: thalli), from Latinized Greek (), meaning "a green shoot" or "twig", is the vegetative tissue of some organisms in diverse groups such as algae, fungi, some liverworts, lichens, and the Myxogastria. A thallus usually names the entir ...

, i.e. a simple body not differentiated into leaves and stems. Definitions have varied, notably about whether mosses and liverworts are included.

Stephan Endlicher Stephan Friedrich Ladislaus Endlicher, also known as Endlicher István László (24 June 1804 – 28 March 1849), was an Austrian Empire, Austrian botanist, numismatist and Sinologist. He was a director of the Botanical Garden of Vienna. Biog ...

, a 19th-century

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

botanist Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...

, divided the vegetable kingdom in 1836 into two groups: the thallophytes were only the algae, lichens and fungi, and the cormophytes were the mosses, liverworts, ferns, Equisitaceae, club mosses and seed plants.

References

Plants Biological classification Historically recognized plant taxa {{Botany-stub