56 now TO GROW GOOD grasses. 



CHAPTER X. 



ON THE SPECIES OE MEADOW-GRASSES. 



Although we possess more than a hundred species 

 of native grasses, we shall rarely find a fourth of them 

 even in a wide range of meadows ; and if we do so, it 

 is rather an argument against than in favour of the 

 quality of their herbage, as, so few are the best grasses 

 in number, that it is almost a law for the best 

 meadows to contain the fewest species of true grasses. 



If, then, the good grasses be so few, whatever is 

 not of these must be inferior, and, indeed, so bad are 

 some grasses that they can only be considered as 

 weeds. These weed-like forms are known to the 

 farmer from his observing that the cattle usually 

 refuse to cat them, and hence he has got to call them 

 " sour grasses," — a term which, though perhaps meant 

 to convey the idea that such are objectionable in 

 flavour, yet it is oftener that they are refused from 

 their want of flavour, or from some mechanical objec- 

 tion arising from their roughness of growth, some 

 having sharp serrated cutting edges to their leaves, 

 whilst the spicular awns, so conspicuous in the beard 

 of barley, cause great irritation by sticking beneath 

 the tongue and in the gums. Of these, the first are 

 objectionable for pasture, the last for hay, and should, 

 therefore, not be found in really good meadows. 



The figures and descriptions which follow are given 

 in illustration of some of the more usual meadow 



