TERMINOLOGY IN MONOCOTYLEDONS. 517 



One reason given for continuing to designate the flowering 

 glume and pa-lea as two paleae is that they often spread equally 

 like two parts of a perianth, and that after flowering they often 

 both fall off with the enclosed fruit as if they had been together 

 disarticulated from the axis of the spikelet. But in several species 

 of Carex, or of other Cyperaceae, as well as in some other plants, 

 monocotyledonous or dicotyledonous, the bract is adnate to the 

 pedicel or floral axis, or even to the perianth, and as the fruit 



ripens is detached with it from the main axis, without ever any 

 such bract being taken as a part of the flower or as a lower brac- 

 teole. And as to the convenience of calling both the glume and 

 palea by one name for the purpose of describing them together, 



that 



grounds 



almost always so different from each other that they must be se- 

 parately described ; and it appears to me that the accurate desig- 

 nation, flowering glume and palea, is not at all more cumbersome 

 than the deceptive one, lower palea and upper palea. 



It is objected also that in uuiflorous spikelets the floral axis is 

 in apparent continuation of that of the spikelet, and that it is 

 then hard to ascertain on which axis the upper scale is inserted 



and thus to distinguish between the glume and the palea ; but in 

 the immense majority of genera and species there is no sucli 

 real difficulty. There is generally an obliquity in the flower, 

 and sometimes, as in Pkleum, a short continuation of the axis of 

 the spikelet behind the palea, independently of the evidence of the 

 true nature of the upper scale almost universally to be derived from 

 its two nerves without any midrib or keel. The really doubtful 

 cases are exceedingly few, as, for instance, Leersia (PL IX. fig. 1), 

 where the two scales of the spikelet are similar in form and vena- 

 tion, though the inner one may be rather narrower. The proba- 

 bility is that they are both glumes on the main axis, and that there 

 is no palea, as is evidently the case in Alopecurus, where there are 

 three glumes, the two outer empty ones often united, the third a 

 flowering one, and no palea. But granting the exceptional un- 

 certainty in Leersia, I would observe that in botanical terminology, 

 as in organography, it' we were to allow single exceptions to in- 

 validate rules of otherwise universal application, we should have 



no general rules left. 



The two or, rarely, three small scales above the palea and below 

 or alternating with the stamens in most grasses, have been sup- 

 posed to represent a reduced perianth ; hut their homology is not 

 satisfactorily demonstrated, and they have therefore appropriately 



