MR. G. BENTHAM ON GRAMINEÆ. 17 
bewail the necessity he was under of getting up these volumes 
without the care and study he could have wished to bestow on 
them, and which he did apply to his next volume on Cyperacez. 
Kunth also in all his works fully adopted Brown's theory as to 
the homology of the parts of the spikelet, carrying it out in detail 
to a degree which sometimes amounts almost to a reductio ad 
absurdum; as, for instance, in Piptatherum and Milium, two 
genera so closely connected in structure that they are still regarded 
by many experienced botanists as slightly different sections of 
one genus. In both genera we see the whole spikelet consist of 
two similar outer glumes without the slightest rudiment of a 
flower in their axis, and of a third glume enelosing a flower and 
its palea; and yet we are told that whilst in Piptatherum we 
have two glumes and one flower, we must in Milium consider 
them as one glume and two flowers. 
Trinius published his * Fundamenta Agrostographi&e ? in 1820, 
something on the plan of Beauvois's ‘ Agrostographie, but evi- 
dently founded on insufficient materials and bibliographical re- 
sources, and with some neglect of the already well-established rules 
of nomenclature. From that time, however, he devoted himself 
with the greatest zeal and increasing success to the study of the 
Order. Iheard him say, à propos of some rather costly collection 
of specimens, that he would willingly sell his last coat for a new 
grass; and all his later works, down to his last papers worked up 
in conjunction with Ruprecht, and published in the Memoirs 
of the Petersburg Academy, are of the greatest value to agros- 
tologists, though he never followed them up by any general synop- 
tieal view of the Order. In respect of terminology, he so far 
modified that of Kunth, that where a glume is theoretically 
supposed to have a flower in its axil, but reaily has not even the ` 
slightest rudiment, he does not, like Kunth, call it a whole 
(neutral) flower, but only half a flower. 
Nees von Esenbeck never confined himself so exclusively to 
Gramines as did Trinius; he never published any general con- 
spectus of the Order, and entered but little into general consi- 
derations of their strueture and terminology ; but he described 
with great care the grasses of various tropical and other extra- 
European regions; he had ample waterials placed at his disposal, 
from the collections of Martius, Dröge, Preiss, and other German 
travellers, and from the herbaria of Hooker, Arnott, and Lindley 
in this eountry, and he came to be regarded as the great autho- 
