A USEFUL FAMILY. IO9 



tie family, immense as it is, consists almost wholly of plants 

 which the world would gladly miss. It contains the most 

 annoying and pernicious weeds. As a family it represents 

 the socialistic, as the orchids do the aristocratic, side of 

 plant life, and because of this socialistic character system- 

 atists place it at the head of all the families of plants. There 

 are two things which the members of the family have car- 

 ried to perfection, if not excess. One is cooperation, the 

 other dissemination. A dandelion blossom, in which the 

 many flowers are crowded into a compact cluster with a 

 common involucre, illustrates the cooperation ; a dandelion 

 seed floating in the air on its winged parachute shows the 

 dissemination. 



The other two families are the most useful of all. The 

 bean family, with its fruit which is called a legume, sup- 

 plies man with many of the most important food stuffs. 

 What would Boston have been, and transcendentalism and 

 Brook Farm and the thousand other notions of Yankeedora, 

 without the brainy staple of Saturday night and Sunday 

 morning, baked beans ? The sacred codfish is not to be 

 spoken of in the same day ! 



But it is the fifth family, Gramineae, the grasses, that 

 excels all others in usefulness to man. The 3500 species 

 are distributed with prodigal liberality over all the world, 

 except the ultra polar regions. They are at their best, too, 

 in temperate regions, the very regions where men most con- 

 gregate. With few exceptions they are useful, supplying by 

 their seeds the principal food of man, and by their succulent 

 stems and leaves sustaining the animals on which man de- 

 pends for flesh food. Though the number of species is less 

 than in the other families the number of individual plants 

 is vastly greater, probably greater than that of the four fam- 

 ilies together. All our cereals, wheat, rye, barley, oats and 

 maize, are of this family. Millions of human beings live al- 

 most entirely on the seeds of a single species, Oryza sativa, 



