76 
behind Germany, where patches of moors or woods are pre¬ 
served as natural monuments on much the same ground as an 
earthwork or a cathedral. It is fortunate, however, that the New 
Forest is a charge of the State and will be preserved for the en¬ 
joyment of visitors and residents for ever. The only fate to be 
feared for this sanctuary of nature is that of spoliation by too 
active naturalists who may visit it. 
Townsend’s Grass or Ricegrass 
( Spartina Toicnsendii). 
By Dr. 0. Staff, F.R S., Sec.-L.S. 
Delivered as a General Lecture at Trinity Hall, January 25th, 1913. 
YNURING the last forty years a grass made its appearance oi\ 
the Hampshire coast. It came no one knows whence; it 
gained ground at first slowly and unobtrusively, then it spread ail 
at once rapidly and, in places, to a trul} 7 amazing extent, so 
much so indeed, that it altered completely the aspect of wide 
stretches of the foreshore and the estuarine reaches of the rivers 
from Chichester Harbour in the East to Poole Harbour in the 
West. It was collected first at Hythe, near Southampton, in 
1870, but mistaken for another grass until, in 1880, it was 
recognised as a distinct and new 7 species by the brothers Henry 
and James Groves, vdio named it Spartina Townsendii , after 
Frederick Townsend, the well-known author of an excellent flora 
of Hampshire. Up to six or seven years ago it w'as rather a 
botanical curiosity. But when, in 1907, Lord Montagu, of 
Beaulieu, called the attention of the Royal Commission for Coast 
Erosion to the startling rapidity with which it took possession 
of the foreshore of Beaulieu River, and its possible use as a land 
reclaiming agent, it became soon an object of public interest, 
under the popular name of “ rice-grass.” This name had been 
picked up by Lord Montagu from some people who told him that a 
few years previously the grass was introduced accidentally by 
a ship that foundered in the Solent. There is, however, no con¬ 
firmation of the story, nor is the name “ rice-grass ” appropriate, 
as the grass has nothing to do with any of the cultivated or wild 
rices. In books, it has also been called “ Townsend’s cord- 
grass,” cord-grass being the English equivalent of “ Spartina ” 
(from Spartum , Latin for Esparto grass or a cord made from it). 
But this again is a misnomer, traceable to a confusion with a 
kind of rush used for making cords. 
Townsend’s Spartina, or Townsend’s grass—as it might 
briefly be called—belongs to a small genus of grasses which are 
mostly natives of the Atlantic coast of America. Only one 
species, Spartina stricta, is really indigenous to Europe, where 
it occurs here and there in littoral marshes from Lincolnshire and 
