THE FLOWERING OF THE GRASSES. 59 



its familiar and delicious perfume to new-mown hay. 

 You can pick a dozen kinds without stirring as you sit 

 on the logs here. There are people who only know all 

 these infinite varieties that go to make up the greensward 

 of England as grass. But they are not grass, they are 

 grasses. In Britain alone we have no fewer than a hun- 

 dred and one species, without counting some seventy 

 sedges which nobody but a botanist would ever think of 

 discriminating from them. They are all really as much 

 unlike one another, when you come to look into them, 

 as a wild strawberry is unlike a dog-rose ; yet even 

 countrymen and farmers make little distinction between 

 them, and not more than a dozen or so have real popular 

 English names — such as fescue, matwecd, wild oats, 

 cordgrass, darnel, and wagging bennets. A few arc 

 troublesome weeds, like couchgrass; a few others arc 

 valuable fodder, like timothy ; and these have naturally 

 acquired names from the cultivators who befriend or 

 exterminate them ; while a few more are striking enough 

 to attract attention by their prettiness, like quakegrass, 

 tares, or nard ; and these have sometimes been quaintly 

 and prettily dubbed with Bible names by village children. 

 But by far the greater number are too inconspicuous ever 

 to have reached the dignity of any nomenclature what- 

 soever till the systematists took them in hand and divided 

 them all artificially into different genera and species. 

 Even the larger groups number in l^ritain forty-two. 



Grasses have very degenerate flowers, almost more 

 so than those of any other known family of plants ; and 

 yet even here we can still dimly trace some vague picture 

 of their earlier pedigree in their present degraded con- 

 dition. It is a great mistake to suppose that evolution 



