BROMUS. AVENA. 217 



Penmanshiel wood : Red Clues cleugh : Blackburn-rigg dean, abun- 

 dant. July, Aug. 



152. Bromus asper. In planted banks and deans, where it 

 raises far above the other grasses its elegantly drooping panicle. 



1 53. B. STERiLis. Waste places, common. A useless but graceful 

 species. June, July. 



154. B. MOLLIS = Serrafalcus mollis. (^oo£ie?Cj;ras"^ : 23ulls 

 grasSS. Common on earth-capt walls, by road-sides, and in fields. 

 June. 



155. B.RACEMOSUs = Serrafalcus racemosus. Cultivated grounds. 

 B. In fields at Penmanshiel, and near the Cove, J. Hardy. In fields 

 near Coldstream, and Anton' s-hill, Miss Bell. In fields about St. 

 Abb's-head. 



156. AvENA FATUA. OTilU ©flt. Com-fields, in a clay soil 

 principally, a very troublesome weed*. — From the contortions of the 

 awn, our rural physiologists conclude that it has sentient life. 

 Jugglers, in the good olden time, predicted events, and told fortunes, 

 from its motions ; and to cover the cheat they called the awn " the 

 legg of an Arabian Spider, or the legg of an inchanted Egyptian 

 Fly.'/ From the hand of jugglers it has passed into the hands of 

 philosophers, and now furnishes them with a very excellent hygro- 

 meter. It seems first to have been recommended by Hooke, who 

 has given a curious description of it in his Micrographia. He 

 asserts that " for the discovery of the various constitutions of the air, 

 as to driness and moistness, it is incomparably beyond any other ; 

 for this it does to admiration." Its sensibility to these changes of 

 the atmosphere seems to depend on the different texture of its parts, 

 for the awn is composed of two kinds of substances, — " one that 

 is very porous, loose, and spongie, into which the watery steams of 

 the air may be very easily forced, which will be thereby swell' d and 

 extended in its dimensions, just as we may observe all kind of vege- 

 table substance upon steeping in water to swell and grow bigger and 

 longer. And a second that is more hard and close, into which the 

 water can very little, or not at all penetrate, this therefore retaining 

 always very near the same dimensions, and the other stretching and 

 shrinking, according as there is more or less moisture or water in its 



8. Bromus secalinus ^ Serrafalcus secalinus. — In corn-fields occa- 

 sionally, introduced with seed from the south. 



* Mr. Watson thinks that the Wild Oat is " probably an agricultural 

 introduction to Britain; that is, imported with foreign seeds of the cereals." 

 " It may be deemed," he continues, " a well-established agrestal weed in the 

 southern provinces ; but hardly more than an alien, renewed by repeated 

 introduction, in the northern provinces." Cyb. Brit. iii. p. 183. — Perhaps 

 we are not sufficiently far north ; but certainly these opinions come 

 strangely over us. Neither do we count that an alien which came to us 

 with the cereals. 'Tis a good family that reckons its ancestry to bevond 

 Roman and Saxon colonizations. 



