118 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1890. 



special attention to Indian Botany, and particularly to the fodder 

 grasses, in the preface to his book on " Fodder Grasses of 

 Northern India," acknowledges having received much assistance from 

 Prof. Hackel, of St. Polten, Hungary, a great living authority on 

 grasses. 



The study is hampered from want of a general treatise on Grami- 

 neae, or a book on the Indian Grasses. It is true we have Steudel's 

 " Synopsis Plantarum Glumacearum," published in 1855 ; but of this 

 work, Mr. Bentham says the following in the Journal of the 

 Linnean Society : — " The last general enumeration of Graminece 

 was that of Steudel, who published in 1855 the first volume of his 

 ' Synopsis Plantarum Glumacearum/ the worst production of its kind 

 I have ever met with." 



We have also Kunth's Enumeratio Plantarum. The first two 

 volumes contain a description of grasses, which is, according to 

 Mr. Bentham, far too hasty a compilation. 



We have books describing almost all the flowering plants and even 

 ferns growing in India and Ceylon, with their drawings, coloured, 

 hand and nature-printed, but we do not possess a good treatise on. 

 Indian grasses. Roxburgh and Dalzell and Gibson in their respective 

 Floras describe many Indian grasses, but there are several important 

 omissions in them, as will be apparent from the list given below. 

 Mr. Duthie's book, alluded to above, is a valuable contribution to 

 the study of grasses, but he confines himself to the fodder grasses of 

 a part of India only, and his descriptions of many genera and species 

 are very short. He has given illustrations of 80 species, drawn by 

 nature-printing process ; but they would have been more valuable 

 had they furnished dissections of the spikelets of each specimen. 



Another difficulty in the way of the student of Botany is the want 

 of a good herbarium, as in Calcutta and in various parts of Europe, 

 where plants are well mounted and named. The advantages of an 

 herbarium are best known by those who have had occasion to resort 

 to it. Mr. Duthie in his abovementioned book thus describes in a 

 few words the benefit he derived from the Calcutta Herbarium : — 

 " My annual visits to the Royal Botanical Gardens near Calcutta 

 have been of much advantage, more particularly in connection 

 with the strictly botanical portion of this work. In addition to an 



