4 GRAMINE^. 



structure and arrangement. This work is costly, while the more 

 generally known first two volumes of his ' Enumeratio Plantarum,' 

 containing the grasses, were unfortunately a far too hasty compila- 

 tion. Kunth in all his works fully adoiDted Brown's theory as to 

 the homology of the parts of the S2)ikelet. 



" Trinius published his ' Fundamenta Agrostographias ' in 1820, 

 evidently founded on insufficient materials. From that time, 

 however, he devoted himself with the greatest zeal and increasing 

 success to the study of the order, I heard him say, a lyropos of 

 some rather costly collection of specimens, that he would willingly 

 sell his last coat for a new grass ; and all his later works published 

 in the Memoirs of the Petersburg Academy are of the greatest 

 value to agrostologists. 



" Nees von Esenbeck entered but little into general considera- 

 tions of the structure and terminology of the Order; but he de- 

 scribed with great care the grasses of various tropical and other 

 regions. He had ample materials from the collections of Martins, 

 Drege, Preiss, Hooker, Arnott and Lindley, and he came to be 

 regarded as the great authority for the determination of exotic 

 Graminese. His ' Agrostographia Brasiliensis ' is perhaps the best 

 of all his works ; and his ^ Flora Africao australis ' is also very 

 good. He showed a tendency to multiply genera as well as 

 species. He worked up the grasses of each country separately, 

 without paying sufficient attention to the cosmopolitan nature of 

 so many species. 



" The last enumeration of Gramineae was that of Steudel, who 

 published in 1855 the first volume of his 'Synopsis Plantarum 

 Glumacearum, ' the worst production of its kind I have ever met 

 with. He was an excellent mechanical compiler, . . . but beyond 

 that, as he was no botanist, he Avas thoroughly incompetent for the 

 task he had undertaken. "Whenever he met with a grass he could 

 not readily make out, he set it down as new, with new name, and 

 a character so carelessly drawn up as to render its identification 

 hopeless without recourse to the specimens themselves; ... in 

 one case describing as a caryopsis the larva which had eaten up the 

 ovarv and taken its place in the enlarged pericarp. Having, more- 



