Grasses
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At that
account. This grass was first found at Hythe in England in 1870. It has since spread rapidly along the South coast and has invaded the Normandy coast of France. It was thought at first to be a foreign invader-but this is now disbelieved. Cytological evidence shows that it has no less than 126 chromosomes. So that possibly hybridisation and doubling of the chromosomes may account for this useful arrival. My first acquaintance with it was in 1918 from Carey and Oliver's "Tidal Lands." time I was in Hong Kong and was anxious to have the grass tried experi- mentally on those terrible inter-tidal mud flats which disfigure so much of the sea coast in the New Territory. I then failed but I hope to try again. Its speed of growth and usefulness in reclaiming salt-marshes and mud swamps have made this grass a godsend, and now Mrs. Arber gives a glowing account of its beauty in the Baie des Veys on the French coast. Who knows but if it were transplanted to the mud flats of the Canton River it might become more polyploid still and not only transfigure the landscape there but return to us as a beneficial emigrant like Timothy.
It would be sheer impertinence on our part to attempt to criticise this book. Its format, its printing, and Mrs. Arber's delicate illustrations make it a perfect pleasure to read. Almost 500 pages of highly technical English terms, as well as hosts of botanical names, generic and specific without, as far as we could see, a single error, throw a lustre on the Cambridge University Press and all concerned in its production. True, we might pick a crow with Mrs. Arber about some of her terms, but we know we could only expect a few quills. Mrs. Arber is painfully fastidious about her terminology, as witness her notes on the spelling of gynæcium. and No andrœcium, but yet she writes caryopses as the plural of caryopsis. doubt it has classical justification, but it is not sanctioned by the S.O.E.D. Again, she writes 'stomates' possibly an early form. This, too, is not
sanctioned by the S.O.E.D.; for though it gives the singular 'stomate,' it distinctly states that this is the singular of 'stomata.' She has monantochloë -possibly the original form. But 'anthos,' not 'antos,' is the Greek for a flower: but even if Linnaeus himself or Darwin made the mistake In another originally that is no reason why it should be followed now. place she writes, 'the twist of the column is dextral.' Now here, though An old Mrs. Arber has the S.O.E.D. with her, we cannot agree. mathematical master at school never tired of telling us, of motion in a circle or a spiral you can never say left or right, sinistral or dextral: you must always say clockwise and contraclockwise.
When I read the account of the twist in the awn of avena, anthoxanthum, stipa, and danthonia I took out specimens of the plants to see if the direction of the twist was constant. Mrs. Arber offers no ex- planation of the direction or constancy. As a few of my specimens were from Natal my interest naturally turned to them to see if the twist was in the opposite direction (for Marie Stopes' baby would kick itself round so as to have its head pointing to the South pole if it was born south of the Equator). But they were all alike. But is there unfailing constancy of twist? Mrs. Arber quotes from Percival, apparently with approval, the
July 1935.
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