ish taste. This plant is relished well by cattle, and may form very
good food for them, according to the recommendations of it.
Big.
ORDER 260. P IS T IA C E jE . D uck-we ed T r ib e .
The simplest of the flowering plants ; a mere leaf or leaves,
with root-like appendages, floating on water. Pistia, from which
the order is named, grows in India and in the West Indies.
Flowers 2, a single stamen and pistil, rising from the margin of
the leaf; properties of no consequence.
L emna. L. 2. 1. Duck-weed. Duck-meat.
Stamens 2, near the pistil; utricle 1 — 5-seeded \ floating.
L. minor. L. Leaves 2 or 3, scale-like, entire, small,
smooth, with a single undivided fibre or root passing into the
water but not into the earth. Often covers many rods of ponds.
L. polyrhiza. L. Water Flax-seed. Often mixed with the
other ; rather larger, firmer union of leaves, which send out several
fibrous roots ; abundant.
L. trisulca. L. Floating like the others ; leaves half an inch
long, thin, mostly pellucid, with a single root on the under side,
sending out a stem from a slit in the leaf, and thus producing
another leaf, and proliferous in this manner, and appearing like
leaves strung along or attached to a filamentose stem.
All these species of Lemna, originating in seed, are propagated
by leaves produced from leaves already formed ; flowers very
minute, very rarely seen, appearing in spathe-like openings in the
side of the leaves ; a very curious genus of plants, but of little
known use.
GLUMACEiE. 227
TRIBE II. GLUMACEiE,
(Or plants bearing glumes or chaff.)
By Linnaeus the chaff of the glumiferous plants was considered
as the calyx, or corolla, or both, because it corresponded in
place to these organs in other plants. Although these organs
are associated with the other common parts of the flower, they
are not now considered as the same, but as bracts, imbricated or
lying over each other. We are familiar with these glumaceous
organs in the chaff of rye, wheat, oats, barley, &c.
These glumiferous plants are disposed in two orders ; 1. the
G ramineje, or Proper Grasses, and 2. the C vperoideje, or
Sedge Grasses. By the common observer, both are blended under
the general name of the Grasses.
In both these orders, the essential organs of fructification are,
generally, found in each flower, though these organs are occasionally
on different plants, or different parts of the same plant.
Among the Sedge Grasses, the genus C a r ex, of which more than
160 species have been found in North America, never has the
stamens *and pistils, the essential organs, situated in one flower,
but the plants are monoecious or dioecious.
The Proper Grasses have cylindrical or hollow stems, with a
large portion of silex deposited in the outer coat of the stem, as
in wheat, rye, reed, cane, &c. The stems are sometimes so
siliceous as to strike fire with steel. Their seeds contain a large
quantity of farinaceous matter, which renders them nutritious as
the food of man and of various animals. That the seed of wheat,
rye, rice, &c., are so exclusively used for food, is because those
seeds are larger, and the plants are more- readily cultivated, and
yield a greater quantity of seed to the same space of land, and
not because others do not contain farina to the same extent.
In the Sedge Grasses, the stems are not fistular or hollow, as
in the others, but are angular, solid, or with a pith extending
through them. The seeds, too, are mostly destitute of the
farinaceous nutriment found in the other order of the glume plants.
The Sedges, though many species are eaten by cattle as fodder
are not relished by them except in their young state, and are