92 Alfred J. Ewart. 
fruit, — Glumes 3, the two outer unawned, and hardened when the fruit 
is ripe, the flowering glume membranous and awned in the hermaphro- 
dite flower, unawned in the male flowers, — Awn dorsal and persistent, 
and bent about one-third of its length from the glume, the part below 
the bend being spirally twisted. — Stigma lobes covered all over with 
rather long processes. — Caryopsis narrow, and enclosed in the per- 
sistent, hardened sterile glumes. — The genus belongs to the group 
Agrostideae (Engler and Prantl). Owing to its having a membranous 
flowering glume, it falls under sub-group B, and under the section d of 
Engler and Prantl’s Pflanzenfamilien, because the stigmatic lobe have 
processes situated all round them. It belongs to the same Sub-section 
as the genus Limnas, from which, however, it differs in the following 
important respects: — 1. In height and general habit Limnas is a short, 
slender type of grass. — 2. All the spikelets in Limnas are hermaphro- 
dite, and they do not occur in definite groups of 3. — 3. The awn is 
short. — 4. In Limnas, the style branches are united above the middle 
of their length. — The fact that the classification adopted for the 
Agrostideae brings these two widely dissimilar grasses close together is 
sufficient to show its artificial character. The fruit of Sarga shows 
much external resemblance to that of Stipa. This would be still further 
increased by the loss of ihe lateral male spikelets and their stalks, 
leaving the short pointed disarticulating common stalk as the basal point 
of the Stipa fruit. The latter is, however, within the outer glumes in 
Stipa, but below them in Sarga, so that the two mechanisms are mor- 
phologically dissimilar, in spite of their homoplastic resemblance. — This 
feature, and the readily separated awn of Sarga, thus shows the be- 
ginnings of a parallel development of the dispersal mechanism, so highly 
perfected in Stipa. On Bentham's classification, the grass would form 
the type of a new sub section ,Sargaceae* intermediate between the 
Stipaceae and Agrostideae, and with the following characters: — „Spike- 
lets one-flowered, two male spikelets, and a single hermaphrodite one, 
on a common stalk: awn long, dorsal, loosely attached, twisted and 
bent: fruiting glume thin, but the fruit enclosed by the outer hard per- 
sistent glumes, and the persistent pedicels of the male flowers, hairs 
present on the pointed axis below the articulation of the 3 spikelets.* 
55. Sarga stipoidea Ewart and White, l. c., p. 297, pl. LV, fig. 1— 7. 
(Gramineae.) — Stems very long, round, solid, with swollen nodes, at- 
taining 5 to 8 or 10 feet in height, and 4 to 10 cms, in diameter; appa- 
rently perennial at the base-erect, glabrous, with conspicuous nodes. 
Leaves about 4 lines in breadth, with a very prominent central midrib, 
glabrous on the upper surface, but very slightly hairy underneath, with 
short split sheaths at the base, and longer ones enclosing the stem 
higher up. Ligule small, membranous, the notch between it and the 
stem filled with hairs. — Panicle loose, about 1 foot or a little more in 
length, pedicels very slender and numerous, situated in whorls along 
the main axis 1—5 inches apart, and closer towards the top. The com- 
