196 
THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 
Now for the grasses, which are everywhere flowering abundantly. 
They gleam in the meadow like silver feathers ; they sparkle amid 
the herbage of tangled hollows with their whitish, yellowish, reddish, 
cloudy sprays of indeterminable beauty ; they make the dusty high- 
way cheerful with their humble imitations of oats, and rye, and 
barley, and they climb to the tops of the old walls, and to every 
lodge on the old tower, and make greybeards, and hoary seams, and 
strange scars and splashes on the masonry, to indicate that time 
despises architectural lines, and can deface them all by the aid of 
grains of dust that float on the air unseen. One little grass seed 
wafted to the top of the turret shall suffice, in the course of years, 
to clothe the whole of some vast ruin w ith a green tracery of loveliest 
vegetation, the roots of which shall eat into its very heart, and cause 
its ultimate return to the dust, out of which, as proud art directed, 
it originally sprung. 
The grasses constitute a great natural order, which bears the col- 
lective designation Graminacece. This order includes all the grasses 
commonly recognized as such, together with all the grain-producing 
plants, such as wheat, rice, maize, millet, sugar-cane, etc. They all 
bear true flowers, which are destitute of proper corollas, and these 
flowers are succeeded by seeds, which more or less resemble 
barley, oats, or wheat, except it may be in size and colour, and 
these seeds usually contain a large amount of nourishing farina, 
which renders them valuable as food to man or to cattle, or to the 
little singing birds that trust themselves to God for all in all. In 
their roots they are not, generally speaking, peculiar, but in their 
stems and leaves they present unique characters. The stems are 
cylindrical (never triangular), usually hollow, always jointed, with a 
leaf at each joint, the leaf proceeding from a split sheath, at the 
summit of which there is attached a leafy appendage, called a ligule. 
The grasses grow from within, and belong therefore to the great 
department of the vegetable kingdom to which botanists apply the 
collective term “ endogens,” as distinct from exogens or outside 
growers, this last division comprehending the larger portion of all 
the flowering plants known, and of trees especially. 
The principal associates of the grasses as endogens are palms, 
orchids, and lilies, all of which produce flowers, in most cases beauti- 
ful, but always in some respects different in plan from the flowers 
of exogens. We have now to do with the flowers of the grasses, the 
structure of which should be clearly understood by any one who 
entertains a hope of enjoying the pursuit of field botany. Putting 
aside exceptional cases it may be said that the flowers of grasses 
always contain stamens and pistils, or that the stamens are in one 
set of flowers and the pistils in another. A splendid example of 
the separation of the sexes occurs in the maize or Indian corn. The 
female flowers are produced at the joints on the incipient cobs, and 
the males in the term of a tuft of silken threads, or, indeed, more 
like spun glass at the top of the plant, “ the plumes of Moudnmin.” 
The stamens and pistils are usually enclosed in chaffy husks or 
glumes, which constitute the most conspicuous feature of the in- 
florescence. These glumes or chaffy scales, of which every flower 
