A USEFUL FAMILY. 153 



eat them only when they cannot get grass. These sedges 

 make very poor fodder, and so the farmers chop, them and 

 mix meal with them to tide over the trying season between 

 hay and grass. Nearly all the sedges are wiry, hard and 

 dry, and lack the nutritive elements which the grasses 

 abound in. In their stems and leaves, then, the grasses 

 are infinitely superior, so far as regards usefulness, to the 

 sedges. 



Important as this character of the family is, there is an- 

 other character of at least equal importance. Man cannot 

 conveniently eat grass. Neither his teeth nor his diges- 

 tion are adapted to that end. The fact that the grasses 

 are essential to the welfare of flesh and milk producing an- 

 imals is one of tremendous importance to the human race. 

 No less important is the fact that grasses produce seeds 

 which abound in nutritive matter. When the sedges and 

 the grasses separated from the ancestral stock and from 

 each other it so happened that the two groups had adopt- 

 ed quite different ways of developing their fruit. Every 

 plant that went sedgeward produced a hard, bony seed con- 

 taining little or no nutritive matter ; every plant that went 

 grassward produced a grain. This is a little word, but 

 " O, how mighty ! " A grain ! Botanists call it a " cary- 

 opsis." No other family of plants yields a fruit like it. 

 The little embryo is placed at the base on one side of a 

 mass of farinaceous matter, formerly called "albumen," 

 now more properly named " endosperm." It is this tiny 

 mass of floury matter that feeds the world ! Some species 

 of grass which produced abundant or large seed were used 

 as food unt»ld ages ago. One after another the well known 

 cereals were discovered and improved by cultivation. Of 

 the barley tribe three members have become staple food 

 products, barley, rye and wheat. The rice tribe and the 

 oat tribe and the maize tribe have each made contributions 

 of more than secondary importance to the food products of 



