IMPORTANT WORKS. 3 



with those of the more ])erfect Monocotyledons. Kobert Brown, 

 with liis usual sagacity, pointed out this and other errors, and first 

 laid down the true principles upon which the order could best be 

 divided into tribes and genera ; but he unfortunately took up the 

 idea that the so-called lower and upper palea3 represented three 

 outer segments of a perianth; and although this theory has long- 

 since been proved to be groundless, especially by Hugo Mohl, 

 whose views have been fully confirmed by all subsequent careful 

 observers, yet so great is the authority so deservedly attached to 

 everything that has issued from the pen of Brown, that his expla- 

 nation of the structure of the spikelet is still allowed to influence 

 the terminology adopted in generic and specific descriptions. 



" Shortly after the publication of Brown's ' Prodromus,' Gramin- 

 es& Avere taken up by several French botanists who had acquired 

 materials, ricli for the time, chiefly from North America and the 

 West Indies. Some of these had already been published by Mi- 

 chaux or by Persoon, with more or less assistance from Louis 

 Claude Richard, to whom the credit of all that is good in Per- 

 soon's ' Synopsis ' as well as in Michaux's ' Flora ' has been attribu- 

 ted by several subsequent writers. Michaux's ' Flora ' was pub- 

 lished in 1803, the first volume of Persoon's 'Synoj)sis' in 1805, 

 both antecedent to Brown's. 



" Desvaux published his new genera, first by abstract in 1810^ 

 and afterwards in full in the second ' Journal de Botanique ' in 

 1813. Between these two periods Polisot de Beauvois published 

 his ' Agrostographieie ' in which he undertook a general arrange- 

 ment of the whole order. 



'' A few years later, three eminent botanists undertook the gen- 

 eral study of Graminege. Kunth at Paris and afterwards at Berlin, 

 Trinius in Germany and afterwards at St. Petersburg, and Nees. 

 von Esenbeck at Bonn, afterwards at Breslau, worked more or less. 

 contemporaneously, but with little or no communication with each 

 other. Kunth's ' Revisio Graminium ' ['Pievision des Graminees'] 

 published in 1829 and following years, is a work not only sjilendidly 

 illustrated, but remarkable alike for the accuracy of detail in the 

 descriptions of species, as for several of the views given of their 



