18 ME. G. BENTHAM ON GEAMINEiE. 



rity for the determination of exotic GraminesB. His 'Agrosto- 

 graphia Brasiliensis ' is perhaps the best of all his works ; and 

 his GraminesB for the ' Plora Africse australis ' is also very good. 

 His generic and subgeueric groups appear to me to be often 

 better, or at least more natural, than those of Kunth or Trinius ; 

 although they show in some degree that tendency to multiply 

 genera as well as species, which he afterwards carried to so great 

 an extent ia Cyperaceae, Laurineee, and Acanthaceae. Moreover, 

 he worked up the grasses of each country separately, without 

 paying sufficient attention to the cosmopolitan nature of so many 

 species, which thus appear under different names in his diflferent 

 works. Brown's Australian Panicum semialatum, for instance, 

 is raised by Nees to the rank of a genus under the name of Cori- 

 dochloa in India, and that of Sluffia in South Africa, without any 

 attempt at a comparison of the three plants. 



The last general Enumeration of Graminese was thatof Steudel, 

 who published in 1855 the first volume of his ' Synopsis Plan- 

 tarum Glumacearum,' the worst production of its kind I have 

 ever met with. He was an excellent mechanical compiler ; his 

 ' Nomenclator Botauicus ' was a most useful work ; and if in the 

 Grasses he had confined himself to collecting all the published 

 species with references to or copies of their author's characters or 

 descriptions, he would have rendered good service to the students 

 of the Order ; but beyond that, as he was no botanist, he was 

 thoroughly incompetent for the task he had undertaken. When- 

 ever he met with a grass which he could not readily make out, he 

 set it down as new, with a new name, and a character so carelessly 

 drawn up as to render its identification hopeless without recourse 

 to the specimens themselves. Several of his new genera are well- 

 known species repeated in the ' Synopsis ' under their published 

 names without recognition. A few, indeed, may have to be re- 

 tained ; but others, again, are founded upon the grossest errors, 

 as, for instance, where he describes as a caryopsis the larva 

 which had eaten up the ovary and taken its place in the enlarged 

 pericarp. Having, moreover, no idea of methodical arrangement, 

 his work is a perfect chaos. 



Much has been done, however, for the elucidation of the Order 

 in local Ploras. Already at the close of last century and the 

 commencement of the present one, several continental botanists 

 proposed new genera for anomalous European grasses ; but these 

 were published in works which entered but little into general cir- 



