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grasses until Mitchell discovered some of the now well-known Mitchell and 
Flinders grasses in 1846. Leichhardt had collected many grasses in 
south-eastern Queensland in 1843-5, but no account of them was published 
until much later. Patrick O'Shanesy was an ardent collector of grasses in 
the neighbourhood of Rockhampton from 1867 to 1876, Bowman collected 
over much of Central Queensland during the years 1862-71, Dallachy 
about Cardwell and Cashmere between 1863 and 1871, Thomas Gulliver 
around Normanton for many years from about 1874 onward, and Armit in 
the upper part of the watersheds of the Herbert, Etheridge and Einasleigh 
Rivers about the same time. Mitchell's grasses were studied by Lindley in 
England and descriptions published by Mitchell in 1848; the other collectors' 
specimens were mostly studied by F. Mueller in Melbourne. In 1878 an 
account of all the grasses known from Australia was published in the 
seventh volume of Benthom's Flora Austroliensis; 69 genera and 221 
species and varieties were recorded from Queensland. 
F. M. Bailey took a keen interest in grasses and one of his first 
publications, also in 1878, was An illustrated monograph of the Grasses of 
Queensland in collaboration with K. T. Staiger. Only one volume was 
published containing descriptions and electrotyped figures of twelve grasses. 
In the sixth volume of his Queensland Flora (1902) descriptions ore given 
of 340 species and varieties, 26 of them introduced. 
A Czech botanist, Karel Domin, visited Queensland from December, 
1909, until April, 1910, and in 1915 published a partial revision of 
Australian grasses based on his collections and those at Kew; he described 
or recorded 411 named groups from Queensland, but many of these seem 
to be insufficiently distinguished. 
C. E. Hubbard has already been mentioned; his results and those of 
resident botanists since his visit are being published piecemeal from time 
to time and at present we know of 520 named species and varieties, 
including about 75 naturalized ones; many still await formal description 
and naming. Grasses more than most plants need specialized study and 
those from one part of the world must be critically compared with those 
from other parts. This is time-consuming work. In Australia, botanists 
have their time taken up with a variety of duties and rarely have the 
unbroken time necessory for much monographic work, but what has been 
done has earned a great deal of respect from authorities overseas. 
Since the Flora Australiensi’s, a great deal of work has been done on 
the classification of grasses in general and certain groups in particular. 
Amongst those who have contributed to the knowledge of Australian and, 
particularly, Queensland grasses, we should first mention Eduard Hackel, an 
Austrian agrostologist. In 1889 Hackel published a monograph of the 
great tribe Andropogoneae, a very large group of grasses especially 
abundant in the tropical and subtropical parts of the world and particularly 
difficult to classify. Unfortunately Hackel had relatively few Australian 
specimens for study. Refinements to Hackel's work by Stapf at Kew, 
especially for tropical African grasses, served as the basis for the work 
on Australian grasses by Hubbard and myself. Between 1906 and 1911, Mrs, 
Chase, at Washington, U.S.A., published the results of her studies on generic 
limits within the Paniceae, another large and difficult group, and her 
principles have been followed by most later workers including D. K. Hughes 
(of Kew) in her account (1923) of the Australian species that had been 
treated by most earlier botanists as species of Panicum. Further studies 
by Hubbard and myself have resulted in the recognition of more genera, 
some based on more recently discovered species. From 1926 to 1933, 
Henrard, a Dutch botanist, published the results of his long and painstoking 
work on the genus ArisHda, a group of over 300 species of spear-grasses 
widely spread in the warmer parts of the world; they are very common in 
Queensland where at least 50 species are known to occur. In 1950 
Henrard published an account of the world's species of Digitaria, another 
difficult genus of more than 300 species of which at least twenty-five are 
known from Queensland. Beginning with an account of the Mitchell 
