114 REVIEWS. 



one ; though we might have been constrained by courtesy to 

 adopt it, if this suspicion had occurred to him, and he had 

 been able to confirm it. Again, in the corrections at the 

 close of the " Plantae Hartwegiana?," Mr. Bentham applies the 

 name of " Lasiostega humilis, Rupprecht (ined.) " to No. 

 250, which he had before called a Triodia. The plant is un- 

 doubtedly a male Buffalo-Grass. But no genus Lasiostega is 

 found to be published, nor has this name any appropriateness 

 as applied to the plant in question. 



It is curious to remark that the male plant, being more 

 proliferous by stolons than the female, has nearly displaced 

 the latter, or has (so far as known) attained a wider geo- 

 graphical range as well as a far greater abundance. Prob- 

 ably, in accordance with a general law, the tendency to bar- 

 renness from seed which accompanies copious multiplication 

 by offshoots, has also assisted in the production of this re- 

 sult, — a state of things quite contrary to the genius of that 

 polygamous community which has effected a lodgment in 

 the region of Buffalo- Grass. 



Dr. Engelmann's second genus, Monanthochloe, is founded 

 upon a singular, exceedingly stoloniferous, littoral grass with 

 leaves scarcely half an inch long, with solitary sessile spike- 

 lets, which has long been known to occur on the coast of 

 Texas and Florida (collected by Berlandier, Drummond, and 

 Blodgett), but has never been studied until now. In fact, 

 it has been thought to be something abnormal, on account of 

 its showing as its most interesting feature, a regular transition 

 from the foliage to the paleae of the flowers. Dr. Engelmann 

 notes that the glumes are wanting (perhaps represented by 

 ordinary leaves of the axis of which the spikelet is a direct 

 continuation), the uppermost leaf representing the lowest 

 palea of the spikelet. The latter consists of from three to 

 five flowers, of which the lowest flower and sometimes the 

 next are neutral or rudimentary, from one to three succeed- 

 ing ones are staminiferous or pistilliferous, according to the 

 sex, and the uppermost is also reduced to a rudiment. In 

 the hands of agrostologists such a grass as this will be likely 

 further to elucidate the floral structure of the order, the 



