4 (IHAMINK.E. 



structure aud arrangement. This work is costly, while the more 

 generally known first two volumes of his ' Euumeratio Plantarum,' 

 containing the gnusses, were unfortunately a far too hasty compila- 

 tion. Kunth in all his works fully adopted Brown's theory as to 

 the homology of the parts of the spikelet. 



**Trinius published his • Fundamenta Agrostographia? ' in 1820, 

 evidently founded on insufficient materials. From that time, 

 however, he devoted himself with the greatest zeal and increasing 

 success to the study of the order. I heard him say, a projms of 

 some rather costly collection of si)ccimcns, that he would willingly 

 sell his last coat for a new grass; and all his later works published 

 in the ^lemoirs of the Petersburg Academy are of the greatest 

 value to agrostologists. 



" Nees von Esenbeck entered but little into general considera- 

 tions of the structure and terminology of the Order; but he de- 

 scribed with great care the grasses of various troi)ical and other 

 regions, lie had ample materials from the collections of Martins. 

 Drege, Preiss, Hooker, Arnott and Lindley, and he came to be 

 regarded as the great authority for the determination of exotic 

 <Jramine{i>. His * Agrostographia Hrasilicnsis ' is perhaps the best 

 of all his works; and his 'Flora Afric{\3 australis' is also very 

 good. lie showed a tendency to multiply genera as well as 

 8])ecies. He worked up the grasses of each country separately, 

 without paying sufficient attention to the cosmopolitan nature of 

 so many s^jccies. 



" The last enumeration of CJramineiV was that of Steudel, who 

 published in 1S55 the first volume of his 'Synopsis IMantarum 

 (Jlumacearum,' the worst production of its kind I have ever met 

 with. He was an excellent mechanical comjuler. . . . but beyond 

 that, as he was no botanist, he wjus tboroughly incompetent for the 

 tjisk he had undertaken. Whenever he met with a grass he could 

 not readily make out. he set it down as new. with new name, and 

 u character so carelessly drawn up as to render its identification 

 hopeless without recourse to the specinuMis themselves; ... in 

 one case describing as a caryopsis the larva which had eaten up the 

 ovary and taken its place in the enlarged pericarp. Having, more- 



