The British grasses and sedges / by Anne Pratt.

  • Anne Pratt
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The British grasses and sedges / by Anne Pratt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    19/224 (page 7)
    many other flowering ])lants, wliicli ordinarily form a constituent part of a hay-crop. This use of the M'ord may be very convenient to those who, in tlieir intercourse with each other, require some such comprehensive term which may include grasses and other plants fit for form- ing good pasture-land, or for being converted into hay; but the naturalist understands by grass, such plants only as fall under the description given below of the Gramine^e, a Natural Order of the Sab-class Glumace/e. To this division it is altogether improbable that the botanist, however elementary may be his knowledge, will assign any of the flowering plants described in the preceding volumes; yet it is by no means so certain that the young student may not confound with the grasses other members of the Glumaceous Tribe belonging to the CypERACEiE, or Sedges; for these resemble the grasses so closely in their more obvious characters, that it requires a somewhat practised eye to discriminate them. The points in which the two Natural Orders agree are these:—the leaves are long, narrow, often channelled above, and pointed; they proceed mainly from the root, and grow in tufts: in both, the flowers are destitute of petals, being composed of scales or glumes, and are elevated on a straw-like stem, where they form terminal spikelets or heads, which are either erect or drooping. The characters in which the sedges obviously differ from the grasses are, that in the former the leaves are generally rigid and more or less of a sea-green or glaucous hue; the flower-stem is angular instead of round, solid or pithy and not hollow, and not jointed at the point from which a stem-leaf arises; and in those cases in which the