196 THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



Now for the grasses, which are everywhere flowering abundantly. 

 They gleam in the meadow like silver feathers ; they sparkle amid 

 the herbage of tangled hollows with their whitish, yellowish, reddish, 

 cloudy sprays of indeterminable beauty ; they make the dusty high- 

 way cheerful with their humble imitations of oats, and rye, and 

 barley, and they climb to the tops of the old walls, and to every 

 lodge on the old tower, and make greybeards, and hoary seams, and 

 strange scars and splashes on the masonry, to indicate that time 

 despises architectural lines, and can deface them all by the aid of 

 grains of dust that float on the air unseen. One little grass seed 

 wafted to the top of the turret shall suffice, in the course of years, 

 to clothe the whole of some vast ruin with a green tracery of loveliest 

 vegetation, the roots of which shall eat into its very heart, and cause 

 its ultimate return to the dust, out of which, as proud art directed, 

 it originally sprung. 



The grasses constitute a great natural order, which bears the col- 

 lective designation Graminacea;. This order includes all the grasses 

 commonly recognized as such, together with all the grain-producing 

 plants, such as wheat, rice, maize, millet, sugar-cane, etc. They all 

 bear true flowers, which are destitute of proper corollas, and these 

 flowers are succeeded by seeds, which more or less resemble 

 barley, oats, or wheat, except it may be in size and colour, and 

 these seeds usually contain a large amount of nourishing farina, 

 which renders them valuable as food to man or to cattle, or to the 

 little singing birds that trust themselves to God for all in all. In 

 their roots they are not, generally speaking, peculiar, but in their 

 stems and leaves they present unique characters. The stems are 

 cylindrical (never triangular), usually hollow, always jointed, with a 

 leaf at each joint, the leaf proceeding from a split sheath, at the 

 summit of which there is attached a leafy appendage, called a ligule. 

 The grasses grow from within, and belong therefore to the great 

 department of the vegetable kingdom to which botanists apply the 

 collective term " endogens," as distinct from exogens or outside 

 growers, this last division comprehending the larger portion of all 

 the flowering plants known, and of trees especially. 



The principal associates of the grasses as endogens are palms, 

 orchids, and lilies, all of which produce flowers, in most cases beauti- 

 ful, but always in some respects different in plan from the flowers 

 of exogens. We have now to do with the flowers of the grasses, the 

 structure of which should be clearly understood by any one who 

 entertains a hope of enjoying the pursuit of field botany. PuttiDg 

 aside exceptional cases it may be said that the flowers of grasses 

 always contain stamens and pistils, or that the stamens are in one 

 set of flowers and the pistils in another. A splendid example of 

 the separation of the sexes occurs in the maize or Indian corn. The 

 female flowers are produced at the joints on the incipient cobs, and 

 the males in the term of a tuft of silken threads, or, indeed, more 

 like spun glass at the top of the plant, " the plumes of Mondamin." 

 The stamens and pistils are usually enclosed in ckafly husks or 

 glumes, which constitute the most conspicuous feature of the in- 

 florescence. These glumes or chaffy scales, of which every flower 



