FLOBA OF ADEN . 
391 
Description : — Rootstock sending up hard woody stems 12-18 
inches high and as thick as a crow-quill, smooth, shiuing, with strict 
vermiform roots, the branches often fascicled and clothed at the base 
with pale coriaceous mucronate sheaths. Leaves 8-12 by inch, 
convolute (rarely flat), very narrow, glaucous, coriaceous, striate, quite 
smooth ; sheaths terete, appressed, striate, hard with villous mouth ; 
ligule a few hairs. 
Panicle 12-16 inches long, erect or nodding; rhacliis and branches 
quite smooth, angular, wiry. Spikelets J-f inch long, flat, sessile or 
shortly pedicellate, 10-15-flowered, smooth, white or pale-yellowish; 
rhachilla very short, the hairs half as long as the glumes. Lower in- 
volucral glume £ inch long, scarcely longer than the lowest flowering 
glume, ovate-lanceolate, apiculate; upper involucral glume £ inch long, 
strongly 5-nerved. 
Flowers and fruits in December (Schweinf.). 
Locality : — Eastern shore of the isthmus north of Barriere Gate on 
small dunes and sa'ndhills forming large bushes with stolons often 
reaching 3 feet and more (Schweinf.) ; without locality (Defl., Birdw.). 
Distribution — S. Arabia, N. India. 
13. Cynodon Pers. 
Perennial glabrous grasses ; stems creeping, rooting at the nodes 
and arising from the fascicles of barren shoots and flowering stems. 
Spikes 2-6, in terminal umbels. Spikelets 1 -flowered, laterally 
compressed, sessile, imbricate, alternately 2-seriate and unilateral on a 
slender keeled rhachis ; rhachilla disarticulating above the involucral 
glumes, produced or not beyond the floral glume. Floret hermaphro- 
dite. Involucral glumes narrow, keeled, acute or subulato-mucronate, 
the upper usually deciduous with the floral glume, the lower sub- 
persistent; floral glume exceeding the involucral glumes, navicular, 
firmly membranous, 3-nerved, awnless, the keel ciliate ; palea somewhat 
shorter than the glume, 2-keeled. Lodicules 2, minute, obovate-cuneate, 
glabrous. Stamens 3. Ovary glabrous ; styles distinct, slightly 
shorter than the plumose stigmas. 
Grain oblong, subterete, free within the glumes. 
Species 2. 
Distribution : — One species in S. Africa, the other almost cos» 
mopolitan. 
I. Cynodon dactylon Pers, Syn. I, 85 ; Kunth Enum. PI. I, 259, 
Suppl. 203, t. 16, f. 1; Reichb. Ic. FI. Germ. t. 26, f. 1404 ; Wall. 
