THE GRASSES OF TENNESSEE. 151 



PASTURE GRASSES. 



III. 



While there are over 200 varieties of grasses cultivated in England 

 for the use of domestic animals, in the occupied territory embraced 

 within the United States there are not more than twenty -five, although 

 there is a much greater diversity of soils, surface configuration, climate 

 and latitude. The grasses constituting our meadows are nearly all 

 derived from the eastern continent, where the abundance of the rich 

 pasture lands teem with a great variety of nutritious herbage. All the 

 cereals oats, rye, wheat and barley, are indigenous to the old world. 

 Indian corn is the greatest and almost the only valuable cereal contrib- 

 uted by the new world to the old. The great prairies east and west of 

 the Mississippi abound in a charming and luxuriant vegetation, but the 

 supply of food which they afford for the herds grazing upon them in 

 comparison to the overwhelming quantity of worthless herbage, is very 

 scanty. Exactly the reverse is the condition of the pastures of the 

 eastern hemisphere, where almost every plant that springs from the 

 surface of the earth is rich in nutritive elements. The extensive plains 

 along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, extending to the 

 western borders of Kansas, are the only natural pastures where the 

 growth of an indigenous grass of suitable texture and highly nutritive 

 qualities prevails to the exclusion of almost all other vegetation. The 

 Buffalo grass, JBuchlos dactyloides delicate and low growing species, but 

 very nutritious and exceedingly tenacious of life, possesses dominion 



