28 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF BRITISH GRASSES. 
Colourless, Poa annua, annual meadow-grass. 
Flesh colour, Phlewm pratense, Timothy grass. 
Rose in Alopecurus pratensis, meadow foxtail. 
Purple in Aira cespitosa, hassock grass. 
Yellow, Bromus mollis, soft brome, and most grasses. 
Orange, Bromus erectus, upright brome. 
The pollen is usually of a light straw colour, but as it 
cannot be well examined without a tolerably good micro- 
scope, and even then would offer but doubtful specific 
characters, it need not be further mentioned here. In our 
British species of grasses we find three stamens, with but 
very few exceptions, to each floret, and hence grasses belong 
to the Linnean class Triandria. 
The Pistil consists of a style, which is in one or as it 
were split into two parts, each surmounted by a stigma 
either pointed or feathery; they are mostly very pale in 
colour, but occasionally highly tinted. As our British 
grasses, with but one exception in Mardus stricta, heath 
grass, possess two stigmata, so they belong to the Linnean 
order Digynia. 
Seeds are sometimes loose in the chaff-scales, as in the 
wheat; in others the glumel is adherent, as in barley ;—a 
circumstance which may explain how readily wheat grain is 
shed when “dead ripe,” as the attachment of the seeds to 
the chaff-scales is much less firm than that of the flower to 
the flower-stalk: these facts fully justify the process of 
reaping, as involving more care, for the former, and of the 
rougher method of mowing for the latter ; this, however, is 
now calculated as a matter of expense, and not one of mere 
waste. 
For the sake of perspicuity the following resumé of parts 
is added, which should be studied with a grass in flower :— 
Root...... ee ... The true root fibres. 
Rhizome. . Creeping underground stem. 
Culm ....The whole aboveground stem. 
rf oint ....A single length from node to node. 
Node ....The hard knot between the joints. 
