errestrial life forms made their move on land about 400 mil-lion years ago. Plants crossed the barrier between life in water to life in the atmosphere. With the invention of stable stems, plants overcame hydrological and mechanical problems. The construction of plant stems is the focus of this book. It demon-strates that nature created a framework in which plant stems evolved—annual herbs as well as century-old, 100 m-tall trees, from tropical to arctic environments. The book offers a very wide view of stem anatomy. Chapter 2 explains simple anatomical preparation techniques. The six following chapters present basic, cell-based anatomical traits. Two chapters deal with taxonomically related anatomical stem characteristics in living and fossil plants. Anatomical structures over the globe are intensively discussed. The general part of the book ends with a section about wood decay and wood conservation. One major objective of this book is to show that nature prin-cipally does not distinguish between plant stems of different growth forms, e.g. between small herbs and very tall trees. The following two microscopic cross-sections demonstrate that the basic stem construction of vascular plants, such as ferns, mono-cotyledons and dicotyledons, consists of the pith and the cor-tex, the xylem and phloem, and often a periderm.