MB. G. BENTHAM OK GEAMINEiE. 17 



bewail the necessity he was under of getting up these volumes 

 without the care and study he could have wished to bestow on 

 them, and which he did apply to his next volume on Cyperacese. 

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

 the homology of the parts of the spikelet, carrying it out in detail 

 to a degree which sometimes amounts almost to a reductio ad 

 absurdum; as, for instance, in PiptatTiemmi and Milivm, two 

 genera so closely connected in structure that they are still regarded 

 by many experienced botanists as slightly diiferent sections of 

 one genus. In both genera we see the whole spikelet consist of 

 two similar outer glumes without the slightest rudiment of a 

 flower in their axis, and of a third glume enclosing a flower and 

 its palea; and yet we are told that whilst in PiptatTiermn we 

 have two glumes and one flower, we must in Milium consider 

 them as one glume and two flowers. 



Trinius published his ' Pundamenta AgrostographisB ' in 1820, 

 something on the plan of Beauvois's ' Agrostographie,' but evi- 

 dently founded on insufficient materials and bibliographical re- 

 sources, and with some neglect of the already well-established rules 

 of nomenclature. Prom that time, however, he devoted himself 

 with the greatest zeal and increasing success to the study of the 

 Order. I heard him say, apropos of some rather costly collection 

 of specimens, that he would willingly sell his last coat for a new 

 grass; and aU his later works, down to his last papers worked up 

 in conjunction with Euprecht, and published in the Memoirs 

 of the Petersburg Academy, are of the greatest value to agros- 

 tologists, though he never followed them up by any general synop- 

 tical view of the Order. In respect of terminology, he so far 

 modifled that of Kunth, that where a glume is theoretically 

 supposed to have a flower in its axil, but really has not even the 

 slightest rudiment, he does not, like Kunth, call it a whole 

 (neutral) flower, but only half a flower. 



Nees von Esenbeek never confined himself so exclusively to 

 Q-raminese as did Trinius ; he never published any general con- 

 spectus of the Order, and entered but little into general consi- 

 derations of their structure and terminology ; but he described 

 with great care the grasses of various tropical and other extra- 

 European regions; hehad ample materials placed at his disposal, 

 from the collections of Martins, Drege, Preiss, and other German 

 travellers, and from the herbaria of Hooker, Arnott, and Lindley 

 in this country, and he came to be regarded as the great autho- 



