The Book of Grasses 



ting the grasses, in drying them, in dissolving their soluble parts, 

 in evaporating the solution, and finally in submitting the residuum 

 to chemical analysis. 



Grass stems contain a large amount of silica, and in such seed 

 as that of the species known as "Job's Tears" the hardness due to 

 a silica deposit nearly equals that of agate. Minute particles of 

 silica in the outer cell walls serve in keeping grass stems firm and 

 erect, and if we carefully burn the vegetable matter from one of 

 these stems a perfect skeleton of the structure is left. It is said 

 that wheat straw, without the addition of other material, may be 

 melted into colourless glass, and that barley melts into glass of 

 topaz yellow. 



The varied form and texture of the grasses adapt them to many 

 uses, and even the common grasses of our northeastern states 

 have been made into ropes, mats, paper, baskets, and many fine- 

 plaited articles. Fragrant fans of dark-coloured fibres are made 

 in India from the aromatic rootstocks of a grass, and the entire 

 plant is woven into screens which, when dampened and placed in 

 a current of air, perfume the breeze. Lemon Grass and Ginger 

 Grass, natives of tropical Asia, yield oils strongly scented, as their 

 names imply, and the rootstock of a grass in South America is 

 sometimes used as a substitute for soap. 



A few grasses have been used medicinally, and have been 

 cultivated for medicinal purposes. But it is as food for man, and 

 for the domesticated animals on which he is most dependent, that 

 the grasses have attained their highest importance, and it is on 

 them largely that the great human family is fed to-day. 



The world has seemed to draw a line between the grasses of the 

 fields and those plants that produce well-filled heads of cereals, 

 and has ceased to regard the latter as grasses. Yet the useful 

 grains — corn, wheat, rye, barley, rice, and oats — belong to one 

 family, and are but grasses that have been brought by man to a 

 superior degree of excellence. Rice and wheat have been cul- 

 tivated from time immemorial, and although a century ago wheat 

 was wheat, yet to-day new strains have been developed which 

 grow where in older days the grain could not have been raised. 



Indian corn originated in tropical America, and is one of the 

 few cereals whose native condition is known. It had attained a 

 wide distribution when this country was discovered, and the grain 

 must have been in use in very ancient times. Early explorers 



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