FES 17 1904 



A NEW GENUS OF GKASSES.* 

 B. F. Bush. 



While making a collection of plants along the sandy banks 

 of the Brazos River, at Columbia, Brazoria County, Texas, 

 on April 14, 1899, my attention was attracted by a robust 

 matted, spreading form of Eragrostis very much like Era- 

 grofiiis hypnoides (Lam.) B. S. P., but which was so different 

 in the thicker stems which were pilose with short viscid hairs, 

 the shorter, thicker short-pilose leaves, and the densely 

 short-pilose sheaths, that I at once suspected I had found an 

 undescribed species. 



A careful examination of all the specimens of the creeping 

 forms of Eragrostis seen at Columbia, Texas, during that 

 day and the following days of my stay there, resulted in the 

 discovery of another supposedly undescribed species of creep- 

 ing Eragrostis, but did not disclose the presence of the real 

 Eragrostis hypnoides. 



I had provisionally named the two plants collected at 

 Columbia, Texas, which were very different in appearance, 

 the first having greatly elongated spikelets, and the other 

 much shorter ones in a capitate cluster. While ransacking 

 the synonymy of Eragrostis in the Kew Index at the li- 

 brary of the Missouri Botanical Garden to ascertain if the 

 names I proposed to give these two plants were preoccupied 

 in the genus Eragrostis, I was led to make an examination of 

 Poa also, as many of the species of Eragrostis were first 

 described under Poa, and there learned that there had been 

 described a Poa capitata by Nuttall, in the Transactions of the 

 American Philosophical Society, n. s. 5 : 146 (1837). 



Being curious to learn what had become of this species 

 described by so acute an observer as Nuttall, I consulted the 



* Presented to The Academy of Science of St. Louis, November 2, 1903. 



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