12 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
temptation must be resisted, and a sufficiency of illustra¬ 
tion found in the few special instances that occur to our 
memory, as we indite these chapters. Here is the Guinea 
grass in our collections of growing specimens of graminece . 
It reminds us of Robinson Crusoe, whose supplies of 
corn and rice were obtained in a way that the reader well 
remembers. The owner of an estate at Shuttleworth, 
Jamaica, says Mr. Gosse, in his charming Naturalists' 
Sojourn, received from Africa a cage of finches; with 
these birds a bag of seeds was shipped to serve them as 
food during the voyage. The birds died, and the few 
seeds left were thrown away. Presto ! on the bank 
where the seed-bag was shaken out, sprang up a splendid 
mass of grassy herbage; the horses smelt it out, and left 
their pasture to crop it, and in time that bank became 
the favourite feeding ground for the horses and cattle of 
the estate; and Panicwn jumentorum, the Guinea grass, 
became famous as the most nourishing of all the grasses 
used as fodder. All the low land parts of Jamaica 
are covered with it; and even rocky soils, where few 
other grasses thrive, produce its dense tussocks of juicy 
and ever-verdant growth. Here, under the hedge where 
we have waged a war of extermination against it for 
years, is the couch-grass, in common parlance the most 
hateful of all weeds, for it has not the beauty of bear- 
bine, nor will surface-cleaning remove it, as in the case 
of our rural weeds. Not long since, the Agricultural 
Society of Clermont (Oise) recommended that, instead 
of exterminating this grass, farmers would do well to 
use it instead of malt in making beer, for, like the rest 
of the grasses, it is largely productive of saccharine 
