18 MR. G, BENTHAM ON GRAMINEZX. 
rity for the determination of exotic Graminew. His ‘A grosto- 
graphia Brasiliensis’ is perhaps the best of all his works; and 
his Graminez for the ‘Flora Africz australis’ is also very good. 
His generie and subgenerie groups appear to me to be often” 
better, or at least more natural, than those of Kunth or Trinius ; 
although they show in some degree that tendency to multiply 
genera as well as species, which he afterwards carried to so great 
an extent in Cyperacez, Laurinewe, and Acanthaceæ. Moreover, 
he worked up the grasses of each country separately, without 
paying sufficient attention to the cosmopolitan nature of so many 
species, which thus appear under different names in his different 
works. Brown's Australian Panicum semialatum, for instance, 
is raised by Nees to the rank of a genus under the name of Cori- 
dochloa in India, and that of Bluffia in South Africa, without any 
attempt at a comparison of the three plants. 
The last general Enumeration of Gramines was that of Steudel, 
who published in 1855 the first volume of his * Synopsis Plan- 
tarum Glumacearum,’ the worst production of its kind I have 
ever met with. He was an excellent mechanical compiler; his 
‘ Nomenclator Botanicus’ was a most useful work ; and if in the 
Grasses he had confined himself to collecting all the published 
species with references to or copies of their author's characters or 
descriptions, he would have rendered good service to the students 
of the Order; but beyond that, as he was no botanist, he was 
thoroughly incompetent for the task he had undertaken. When- 
ever he met with a grass which he could not readily make out, he 
set it down as new, with anew name, and a character so carelessly 
drawn up as to render its identification hopeless without recourse 
to the specimens themselves. Several of his new genera are well- 
known species repeated in the ‘ Synopsis’ under their published 
names without recognition. A few, indeed, may have to be re- 
tained ; but others, again, are founded upon the grossest errors, 
as, for instance, where he describes as a caryopsis the larva 
which had eaten up the ovary and taken its place in the enlarged 
pericarp. Having, moreover, no idea of methodical arrangement, 
his work is a perfect chaos, 
Much has been done, however, for the elucidation of the Order 
in local Floras. Already at the close of last century and the 
commencement of the present one, several continental botanists 
proposed new genera for anomalous European grasses; but these 
were published in works which entered but little into general cir- 
