CHAPTER V 

 THE ORDER AND ITS TRIBES. 



THE grasses have a botanical order to themselves, Gramineae, 

 which is one of the two orders — Cyperaceae being the 

 other — forming the Glumiflorae, the most important and most 

 widely distributed group — cohort or series, or whatever it may 

 be called — into which the monocotyledonous plants have been 

 divided. 



The Glumiflorae are defined by Rendle as follows : 



" Flowers, small, naked or with a perianth represented 

 by scales or hair-like structures, enclosed in scale-like bracts, 

 and forming large, compound, indefinite inflorescences, 

 Stamens usually in one whorl of three ; pistil of a single 

 ovary, bearing one to three styles and enclosing a single 

 ovule. Cross-pollinated by aid of wind, or self-pollinated. 

 Fruit usually a caryopsis or nut ; seed containing a well- 

 developed embryo and a large quantity of endosperm. 



"Annual or perennial herbs, or, in some tropical genera 

 and species, shrubby or arborescent. Stem slender, with 

 elongated internodes and alternate linear parallel-veined 

 leaves, divided into sheath and blade, often with a mem- 

 branous outgrowth, or ligule, at the line of union/ ' 

 Keeping clear of theories which do not concern us, we can 

 define the Gramineae as plants in which the flowers are as a rule 

 hermaphrodite, though rarely unisexual, placed generally above 

 a chaff-like bract (the outer palea) and an opposite bract (the 

 inner palea), and having at their base a pair of small scales 

 (lodicules), one or both of which are, exceptionally, absent : 

 stamens usually in a whorl of three (rarely two), sometimes in 

 two alternating whorls, and in rare cases decreased to one or 



37 » 



