[Crown Copyright Reserved. ] 
ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW. 
BULLETIN 
OF 
MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION. 
No. 9] | [1923 
XXXII.—THE GENUS PANICUM OF THE FLORA 
AUSTRALIENSIS. 
D. K. Huaues. 
When the Paniceae were revised by Dr. O. Stapf for the 
Flora of Tropical Africa, he recognised, as do most modern authors, 
the expediency of adopting smaller genera with well-defined limits, 
rather than retaining them as groups of the enormous and unwieldy 
genus Panicum. The arrangement in the Kew Herbarium of the 
African material on these lines also entailed the examination of 
similar groups from other parts of the world. The group 
affording the greatest difficulty, perhaps, consisted of all the 
species enumerated under Panicum by Bentham in the Flora 
Australiensis. Since that great work was published, further 
collections have been added to the Herbarium. Of these, much 
material was incorrectly or only partially named and the morph- 
ology incompletely studied, and much was new. 
The work given here, which is ah outline of a more extensive 
paper intended for later publication, contains an enumeration 
of all the specimens of the group at present in the Kew Herbarium 
and at the British Museum, with Keys to the genera and species 
based, as far as possible, on fundamental characters. Numerous 
notes have been made on morphology, literature and geographical 
distribution, but these, together with drawings of the types, are 
being held over until the writer has had an opportunity of 
amplifying them during a forthcoming visit to some of the 
Herbaria in the United States. 
It must be remembered that the group under consideration is 
limited strictly to Panicum as understood by Bentham, and 
that allied plants which he ae in other oa are not 
considered here. The Key, as a synopsis of the Australian 
Genera of Paniceae, is dhacohoee: incomplete, and the sequence of 
the genera not exactly in accordance with their true taxonomic 
relationship. Thus, for instance, the genus Paractaenum is 
placed in the Key after Echinochloa, but its true affinity is with 
az (78)20643 Wt306—P 32 1000 9/23 E&S A 
