CATALOGUE OF THE GRASSES OF CUBA. 



By A. S. Hitchcock. 



INTRODXTCTION. 



The following list of Cuban grasses is based primarily upon the 

 collections at the Estacion Central Agronomica de Cuba, situated at 

 Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Habana. The herbarium includes 

 the collections made by the members of the staff, particularly Mr. 

 C. F. Baker, formerly head of the department of botany, and also the 

 Sauvalle Herbarium deposited by the Habana Academy of Sciences. 

 These specimens were examined by the writer during a short stay 

 upon the island in the spring of 1906, and were later kindly loaned by 

 the station authorities for a more critical study at Washington. The 

 Sauvalle Herbarium contains a fairly complete set of the grasses col- 

 lected by Charles Wright, the most important collection thus far 

 obtained from Cuba. In addition to the collections at the Cuba 

 Experiment Station, the National Herbarium furnished important 

 material for study, including collections made by A. H. Curtiss, 

 W. Palmer and J. H. Riley, A. Taylor (from the Isle of Pines) , S. M. 

 Tracy, Brother Leon (De la Salle College, Habana), and the writer. 



The earlier collections of Wright were sent to Grisebach for study. 

 These were reported upon by Grisebach in his work entitled '^Cata- 

 logus Plantarum Cubensium," published in 1866, though preliminary 

 reports appeared earlier in the two parts of Plantae Wrightianae." 

 During the spring of 1907 I had the opportunity of examining the 

 grasses in the herbarium of Grisebach in Gottingen.^ In the present 

 article I have, with few exceptions, accounted for the grasses listed by 

 Grisebach in his catalogue of Cuban plants, and have appended a list of 

 these with references to the pages in the body of this article upon 

 which the species are considered. The numbers upon the labels of 

 the Wright specimens in the Grisebach Herbarium are in many cases 

 not the same as those under which the species were afterwards dis- 

 tributed and under which they were listed in the catalogue. These 

 numbers I have designated as secondary numbers. Grisebach has 

 sometimes connected on his labels the secondary number by the sign 



«Mem. Amer. Acad. n. ser. Vol. VIII. Part I, pp. 153 to 192, (as separate) 1860; 



Part II, pp. 503 to 536, (as separate) 1862. The grasses were included in Part II. 



& Unless otherwise stated the writer has examined all the types mentioned in this 



paper. 



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