NOTICES OF BOOKS. 217 
a large number of species (or shall we say specimens ?) with minute 
accuracy; but when he came to publish a general enumeration, the 
urgency of booksellers forced him to draw it up in the greatest haste, 
and he produced a mere compilation, where his own descriptions are 
followed by or intermingled with the diagnoses of others, without 
method or criticism, so that the determination of Grasses by his book is 
perfectly hopeless. A new enumeration, Steudel’s ‘Synopsis Gluma- 
cearum,’ has now appeared, with great pretensions at method, unifor- 
mity of diagnoses, and subdivision of the large genera. Asa compiler 
the author deserves great credit, and produces most useful works of 
reference—indexes, as it were, to the productions of others, but as a 
work of science his Graminee have already met with much deserved 
criticism. His materials must have been totally inadequate to the task ; 
he can have seen but very few authentic specimens of described exotic 
species, for the number of those he repeats as new genera is very con- 
siderable ; his generic, sectional, and specific characters are ill-defined, 
and not contrasted; and the multiplication of species without critical 
comparison is enormous. ‘There are few who have carried out on so 
large a scale the principle, that plants described by different authors 
under different names, or coming from different countries, must be 
distinct, however inappreciable the supposed characters. - 
Among his crities there is one however who has the boldness to 
find fault with him in the opposite direction. Accustomed to the most 
minute microscopical variations used for the distinction of Mosses, Dr. 
Carl Müller proposes to introduce into the specific demarcation of Gra- 
minec iwo elements, against which we must enter our solemn protest : 
—the application of the microscope to differences in the surface and cir- 
cumscription of the herbaceous organs, and what he calls the phytogeo- 
graphical principle. As an exemplification he has taken the genus 
Zoysia, which will also afford an apt illustration of our own views. 
The Zoysia pungens, Willd., is a common sea-coast plant in tropical 
and subtropical Asia, extending from the Mauritius and Ceylon, along 
the shores of India, and thence through the Moluccas to Australia and 
New Zealand, and northward apparently (though perhaps less con- 
tinuously) to China and Japan. Like the European Grasses which in 
a similar manner grow half buried in maritime sands, it varies much 
in size and stature, in the length of the spike, in the number and 
density of the spikelets, in the creeping or tufted stems, om um. 
VOL. VII. 
