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moisture — ^thus commences a zone on whicli cattle may occasionally 

 pasture during the droughts of summer. A little beyond this the 

 ground becomes more and more solid, hay may be made upon it at the 

 proper season ; it is the last. stage of progress between the swamp and 

 the meadow, and destined soon to become indistinguishable from the 

 latter. Independent of its value in forming land from water, the reed 

 growing along the borders of rivers serves to prevent the wearing away 

 of their banks by the action of the current, and thus guards the low 

 lands on either side against the liability to inundation. The banks of 

 the Thames, and other English rivers, are fortified in this manner, and 

 much of the fine arable and pasture land now found in the valleys 

 along which they flow, has been formed by the gradual contraction of 

 their channels through the growth of this grass barrier. 



Perhaps no grass is so widely distributed as Phragrmtes communis, 

 as it is not only met with over the northern hemisphere in both conti- 

 nents, and in our own from Lapland to northern Africa, but is said to 

 be indigenous in South Australia. It is, in an agricultural point of 

 view, useless ; as, apart from the necessary conditions of growth, the 

 foliage is too coarse to be palatable to cattle in general, though both 

 horses and cows are said to occasionally browse on it, in the young 

 state, when within their reach, and probably under deficiency of more 

 succulent herbage, while the stolones, like those of Triticum repens, 

 Glyceria fluitam, and grasses of a similar habit, are sweet and nutri- 

 tious. Its mechanical applications in the vicinity of its natural habitats 

 are numerous, and especially for the rough purposes noticed above 

 under our description of the genus. The culms form the most durable 

 kind of thatch ever yet employed, and, interlaced in a slight frame- 

 work of wood or sticks, are used by gardeners as screens for wall fruit- 

 trees and hot-beds, &c. They serve likewise as a good foundation for 

 plaster floors to cottages, barns, and other buildings oi the kind. 

 Prior to the introduction of quiU pens for writing, which took place 

 about the seventh century in this country, the only pens in use were 

 made of the dried stems of the common reed. Linnaeus, in his ' Flora 

 Lapponica,' informs us that the people of East Bothnia regard this 

 plant, so useful to them for the purposes of shelter, as one of the 

 choicest gifts of nature ; he states further that the country women in 

 Sweden use the panicles for dyeing their woollen cloths green. 



The nests of the sedge and reed warblers Curruca phragmitis and 

 G. arundinacea, and of the bearded titmouse, Parus liarmicus, are 

 generally built between the stems of the Phragmites. The first is the 

 most common, and the bird usually selects three stems nearly equi- 

 distant from each other, around which the vegetable fibres composing 

 the walls of the nest are firmly interlaced, the base of the nest being 

 securely suspended between them a few inches above the water. The 

 bearded titmouse is a comparatively rare bird in England. _ 



The great length mentioned above, occasionally attained by the 

 prostrate stems of Phragmites, applies to stolones projected along the 

 muddy surface of the ground, and not to the cuhns or flowermg 

 stems. 



