GRASS TRIBE 91 
trouble to scare them from their haunts. Mr. Knapp remarks: “ As evening 
advances, one sees crowds of starlings approaching from every quarter in 
_ numbers that exceed belief, to pass the night among the reeds, upon which, 
after various arrangements, thev alight in myriads, bearing down by their 
weight this flexible plant into the water, and one sees large patches lodged, 
and beaten flat, and spoiled.” Men go out in boats to shoot them, and kill 
hundreds night after night, yet these bold birds still come to the reed-ronds ; 
and as the fox lurks there to seize them, he also tramples down a large 
number of the reeds. 
Many of the reed-crops are now altogether destroyed by the improvement 
of the land by drainage, and millions of their waving plumes have disappeared 
before the railroads, and other inventions of recent times. Now and then, 
as we read in some old book, we are reminded how much more abundant 
these and other aquatic plants must have been in the earlier ages of England. 
In the Anglo-Saxon version of the “Life of Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland,” 
a MS. in the Cottonian Library, apparently written before A.D. 749, we find 
continual allusion to these reeds, and see how the fens, with their plants, 
overspread land from which they have now been expelled to make way for 
houses and fields of waving corn. “ There is, in Britain,” says the old writer, 
Felix of Crowland, ‘‘a fen of immense size, which begins from the river 
Granta, not far from the city of Grantchester. There are immense marshes, 
now a black pool of water, now foul running streams, and also many islands, 
reeds, and thickets ; and with manifold windings, wide and long, it continues 
up to the North Sea.” No wonder that Crowland, which was in the midst 
of this wilderness, was described as a place of “manifold horrors and of 
loneliness, so that no man could endure it ;’ and no wonder that the hermit 
who went to live there had his home among reeds and rushes, or that some 
of the incidents recorded by his chroniclers occurred in the “mere, amidst the 
bed of reeds.” 
The reed-grass is commonly palled windle-straw by country people :— 
‘¢ And the windle-straw so limber and grey, 
Did shiver beneath the tread 
Of the coursers’ feet.” 
In Cornwall, where it grows abundantly up the face of sea-cliffs, it is 
known as goss. 
35. (49) LymE-crass (Elymus). 
1. Upright Sea Lyme-grass (L. arendrius).—Spike upright ; spikelets 
2—7-flowered ; empty glumes two, tapering to a point, and downy ; flower- 
ing glumes broader, hairy ; rootstock stout, creeping and perennial. The 
Lyme-grass, which grows in abundance on some parts of our shores, forms 
in May large patches of bluish-green blades, and bears its flowers in June 
and July. Its spike is from 4 to 5 inches long, erect, of a sea-green colour, 
standing on a stem from 2 to 5 feet high ; the leaves are long, broad, hard, 
and rigid, rolled inwards, and ending in a sharp point. Its masses often 
serve as a little oasis on the desert-looking sand flats, sheltering some sand 
flowers or green weeds, which, but for its protection and the solidity of soil 
12—2 
