INTRODUCTORY. 



is the flowering glume) being the outer palea and the upper of 

 the pair the inner palea. 



The beginner linds the flowers of the grasses rather awkward 

 to deal with at first, as they are too small for the ordinary magnify- 

 ing glass and too large for the microscope. The best aid is 

 afforded by a dissecting microscope of low power, but a glass 

 answers every purpose if magnifying rather more than the usual 

 run of such things. Anyhow a lens of some sort is essential, 

 though in this particular case we can see without it that the 

 spikelet is not orbicular — wherefore the genus is not Briza — and 

 further that it has glumes, and consequently cannot be Leersia. 



Without the glass, too, but better with it, we can see that 

 each spikelet has but one floret. And 

 that helps us much, for we have only to 

 feel the leaves whether they be smooth or 

 rough, and finding them smooth and broad 

 we know the genus to be Milium without 

 further ceremony. As there is only one 

 species of Milium in the British flora, the 

 grass must be M. effusum, the Spreading 

 Millet, as we might have guessed from its 

 height and from our meeting with it in our 

 walk through the woods. 



Let us, however, with the aid of the 

 glass, open up this spikelet and compare 

 it with a diagram in which the typical 

 arrangement of the florets is shown. Spike. 



Lowest of all we have the outer glume, 



slightly above and opposite to it is the inner glume. Higher 

 up the rachilla is the outer palea with the inner palea 

 opposite. Within the paleae more or less we have the pistil 

 with the lodicules — in this case two — at the base, and round it 

 is the whorl of three stamens, the first placed just above 

 the outer palea, and often rather larger than the others, 

 each stamen with a longish filament carrying the double 

 notched anther. In one British genus, Anthoxanthum, there 

 are only two stamens ; in some genera, all foreign, there 



