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popular language, the part that falls is called the "seed/'^ In many groups 
of grasses, this '"seed" has a sharp point ot the base, barbed with short 
hairs. Grasses with such "seeds" are often called "spear-grasses," because 
the seed may pierce clothing and flesh. The number of florets in each 
spikelet, the arrangement of the spikelets, the texture and shape of the 
glumes and lemmas ond the number and arrangement of their veins, 
details in the structure of the groin and the way it is shed, all vary 
considerably and provide many of the characters for discriminating the 
species and for classifying the family as a whole. 
Species and genera are the basic units of classification and nomen- 
clature in biology, but these units are less tangible and less readily 
comprehended than the units of length or weight. Usually there is no 
doubt about what constitutes an individual animal or plant, but there are 
many plants like couch grass that produce underground parts from which 
arise conspicuous aerial parts; it is not easy to be sure whether different 
aerial shoots belong to different individual plonts or not. A species, 
broadly speaking, is a kind of plant, made up of a large number of 
individuals, resembling one another more closely than they do other 
individuals. A genus may be described as a group of species each of 
which resembles the others more closely than other species outside the 
group. Each genus has its own particular name and the name of a species 
is formed by adding a qualifying word (specific epithet) to the generic 
name. The naming of plants is governed by an internationally accepted 
series of rules, the international Code of Botanical Nomenclature. 
The grasses ore usually considered to be an especially difficult family 
to classify, and in spite of the work of many able botanists during the 
past two hundred years, a great deal still remains to be done in this field. 
There is still lack of agreement as to the limits of many genera. While 
it is possible for an ordinarily keen observer to learn to discriminate most 
of the grasses in his neighbourhood, it is a much more difficult problem 
to discriminate and classify the grasses ot a large area such as Queensland. 
Anyone wishing to do so has to ignore geographical boundaries and pursue 
his studies wherever his plants lead him until the grasses of a continent 
and then of even wider regions must be admitted to his acquaintance. 
Fortunately, a large proportion of grasses can be well represented by 
orcfinary herbarium specimens so that wide and intensive studies of many 
features can be made from a good collection of dried specimens. The 
ease with which the seed-heads of some groups of species break up make 
preparation of good dried specimens of these a difficult matter. 
The foundations of our knowledge of Queensland grasses were the 
collections of Banks and Solander in 1770 and Robert Brown in 1802. 
Banks and Solander, naturalists with Captain Cook in the "Endeavour", 
landed at a few places along the Queensland coast, but so far as I can 
find, nearly all the grasses were collected near the mouth of the Endeavour 
River, where Cooktown now stands. They spent six weeks there in July- 
August, an unfavourable time for collecting grasses. In all, about thirty 
grasses were collected in what is now Queensland. However, various 
circumstances delayed publication of their findings and it remained for 
Robert Brown to make public the results of their work in conjunction with 
his own. Brown was naturalist on the "Investigator" during Matthew 
Flinders's survey of the southern, eastern, and part of the northern shores 
of Australia. He collected at several places along the Queensland coast 
and nearby islands between Sandy Cape and the mouth of the Pioneer 
River, some of the islands in Torres Strait, most of the islands of the 
Wellesley Group in the Gulf of Carpentaria and very briefly at one or two 
points on the eastern shores of this gulf. Many grasses were collected west 
of the Queensland border that have since been found east of it. Part of 
the botanical results of this exploration was published in 1810 in his 
Prodromus Floroe Novae HoMondiae and the broad classification of grasses 
worked out for this has been used by most succeeding workers in the 
family. Brown recorded 33 genera and about 100 species from the 
Queensland coast. Little more was added to our knowledge of Queensland 
