340 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
states that the upper flower of H. lunatus bears a stout bent awn 
below the apex, there is a brief marginal note in the hand-writing 
of the well-known botanical collector, Mr. Charles Wright, who 
simply underscored the word ‘‘ bent” in the text and wrote the 
word siruight on the margin of the page. Evidently he too, in 
previous years, — at the time when he was connected with the Bus- 
sey Institution, — bad examined fresh specimens of the grass from 
the adjacent meadow, and had not failed to recognize the discrep- 
ancy between the appearance of the fresh flower and the printed 
description of it. 
Il. Vitality of the cleistoyamous seeds of Danthonia spicata 
(white-top or wild oat-grass). In an interesting and important. 
paper published in 1878, Mr. C. G. Pringle * has shown that, in 
addition to the ordinary tufts of seeds at the summit of the stem, 
the ‘‘ white-top” or ‘* wild oat-grass” which infests so many poor 
pastures in Northern New England bears numerous spikelets of 
seeds just above each joint of the culm and hidden within or be- 
neath the sheaths of the leaves. Mr. Pringle dwells on the impor- 
tance of these cleistogamous seeds as a means of disseminating the 
worse than useless grass and upon the consequent difficulty of 
coping with it in old mowing-fields and pastures. He argues with 
much force that the unparalleled and irresistible spread of the plant 
in recent years attests the efficacy of the means provided for its 
dissemination. Relying doubtless on the known fertility of cleis- 
togamous flowers, he does not say explicitly that he has ever tested 
the germinative power of any of the seeds that have grown beneath 
the leaf-sheaths. In order to determine this question a number of 
the hidden seeds were picked out from beneath the leaf-sheaths of 
dried specimens of the grass which had been collected in the pre- 
vious year and preserved in an herbarium, and the seeds were 
planted in loam that had been calcined in a muffle for the purpose 
of destroying all traces of organic matter. The roasting to which 
the loam was subjected would of course destroy any seeds — 
whether of grasses, weeds, or other plants — which might have 
been contained in the earth originally. The pots that held the 
loam and the seeds were placed in a greenhouse and were watered 
with distilled water at first, and afterwards with a highly dilute 
solution of saltpetre (1:1000). Under these conditions, and in 
* «Fifth Report of the Vermont Board of Agriculture, for the Year 1878,” 
p. 242. 
