324 REVIEWS. [January, 



ask than to answer^ What are British grasses, or British species, 

 in general? British botanists cannot say very precisely what 

 are British grasses. They have not yet agreed on the period 

 necessary — first, for naturalization ; second, for denizenship ; 

 and third, for nativity. There is still another class, the stirpes 

 indigent, or, as a writer in the ' Phytologist^ would term them, 

 ^oravai avTO')(6ovaL (aboriginal natives) . 



There is an interesting account of a district, in the province 

 of Moray, covered (inundated) in the course of a few years by a 

 sand-flood, a consequence of eradicating, or of not protecting, 

 the Psamma arundinacea, which, by its long roots, binds the 

 sand which the waves and winds pile up on the shores. There 

 is a legendary story of a district, on the Buchan coast, where 

 an entire parish was overblown by a sand-drift in one night. 

 The property belonged to two ladies, who were dispossessed 

 by an unfeeling kinsman, and they prayed that the land might 

 be cursed, and it was forthwith covered by barren sand. 



This plant and an Elymus get the credit of an immense 

 amount of positive good in the prevention of sand-floods; but 

 they are not the only plants which bind the loose and shifting, 

 blowing sand. Several Carices are found to have similar pro- 

 perties. These also bind the loose sand with long ^tenacious 

 roots, and several Dicotyledonous plants likewise, as Convolvulus 

 Soldanella, Eryngium maritimum, and others, "quae nunc enu- 

 merare longum est." Yet these two plants, the Psamma and the 

 Elymus, get all the merit, and the humbler and equally useful 

 species are overlooked. The former are prominent ; the latter, 

 with the exception of the Eryngo, are humble, or prostrate, — a 

 tempting subject for a bit of moralization, " at verbum sat." 



To help those who are undecided about the merits of Phleum 

 pratense as a grass and hay-plant, the following account may be 

 helpful. When we were in Scotland in 1856, we fortunately 

 fell in with the land-steward of the Marquis of Breadalbane, 

 somewhere near Glenlyon. He was going to superintend the 

 making of a large field of hay, the grass of which was exclusively 

 P. pratense. In Scotland, almost the only cultivated grass used 

 to be Lolium perenne. We were delighted to see that, here and 

 there, L. italicum or L. multiflorum was taking the place of the 

 former. On inquiry, we learned that the produce of Phleum 

 pratense was much greater than Lolium perenne, and that it was 



