THE BUFFALO-GRASS. 113 



out a happy conjecture as to its natural relationship. Torrey 

 figured it twelve years ago, and also announced its affinity to 

 the ChloridecB ; he at the same time discovered its dioecious 

 character, and showed that only the male plant was known. 

 At length Dr. Engelmann has detected the female plant in 

 a rather rare grass, the Anthephora axilliflora of Steudel, 

 which is so unlike the common Buffalo-Grass that it naturally 

 had been referred to a widely different tribe. Struck by the 

 similarity of their foliage and stoloniferous growth, as they 

 occurred together in a collection made by his brother. Dr. 

 Engelmann shrewdly suspected the relationship, and finally 

 set the question at rest by finding a male Buffalo-Grass which 

 happened to bear a stalk of female flowers from the same root- 

 stock ; and these flowers were those of the so-called Anthe- 

 phora. So different are the two that nothing short of this 

 ocular proof would have been convincing. It hardly need be 

 said that the male plant is not a Sesleria, nor the female an 

 Anthephora ; although they severally resemble these genera, 

 or at least the female spikelets have a very great external re- 

 semblance to the Paniceous genus Anthephora. So that Dr. 

 Engelmann, having to characterize this new generic type, very 

 r.aturally named it Biichloe (shorter and more euphonious 

 than Bubalochloe), i. e. Buffalo-Grass ; and he retained the 

 s^Decific appellation of dactyloides, although the male plant 

 is not much like a Dactylis, and the female wholly unlike. 

 Very glad we are to see the genus established under so ap- 

 propriate a name, — the more so as it has narrowly escaped a 

 different fate. That is to say, two inchoate attempts seem to 

 have been made to found a genus upon the male sex. First, 

 in Sir William Hooker's enumeration of the plants of Geyer's 

 western collection we find " Calanthera dactyloides. Kth. — 

 Nutt. Sesleria, Nutt. Gen. i. p. 65." But neither Kunth nor 

 any other author has described a genus Calanthera. We have 

 a suspicion that the " Kth." is a slip of the pen, and that the 

 name is really Nuttall's, given by him to a specimen in the 

 Hookerian herbarium. But if this be so, the manuscript 

 name (which, moreover, is destitute of any particular signifi- 

 cance) can by no means now supersede Engelmann's published 



