THE JULY PAGEANT. 75 
midsummer and the autumn. The season of hay- 
making has come. The rattle of the mowing-machine 
in the open meadows and the whetting of the scythe by 
the busy mowers on the rocky upland or along the 
walls and fences lined with thick shrubbery blend pleas- 
antly with the other sounds which now fall upon the ear. 
The tall butter-cups, the purple cone-flowers, the ox- 
eye daisies, the meadow rue and many others fall with 
their more modest and humble neighbors, the grasses, 
with no Burns to sing their fate. The fragrance of the 
new-mown hay, the last tribute of the dying flowers, is 
associated with many of the most pleasant rural scenes. 
The grasses form a very conspicuous part of the summer 
vegetation by their size, their number, and the variety 
of the species. The smallness of their flowers may de- 
ter the young botanist from attempting to study them, 
but no family repays study better. Rare grasses are as 
satisfactory “finds” as any other plant can be. When 
Robert Dick, a baker at Thurso in northern Scotland, 
and at the same time an enthusiastic geologist and bot- 
anist, discovered the northern holy grass (Aierochloé 
borealis, R. & S.) growing near Thurso, the botanists 
of Great Britain were greatly surprised, and the Royal 
Botanical Society sent Dick a special vote of thanks for 
his paper announcing the locality of the grass and for 
specimens of it. Years before, this plant had been ad- 
mitted into the British Flora on the authority of Don; 
