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GRASSES.
A. H. CROOK.
Among the devotees of natural history there are few more interesting figures than Gilbert White. He lived through stirring times in European and Colonial history, but through them all he showed that unique detach- ment of mind which is more interested in the nesting habits of the nightjar than in the Declaration of Independence; is more affected by an unusual cloud of insects than by the French Revolution, He left us two interesting observations. One of these, in May 1777, was on earthworms. About a hundred years later Charles Darwin took up the hint then dropped and gave us "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.”
In the second observation, about a year later, Gilbert White says:-
"Of all sorts of vegetation the grasses seem to be most neglected, neither the farmer nor the grazier seem to distinguish the annual from the perennial, the hardy from the tender, nor the succulent and nutritive from the dry and juiceless. The study of grasses would be of great consequence to a northerly and grazing kingdom. The botanist that could improve the sward of the district where he lived would be a useful member of society: to raise a thick turf on a naked soil would be worth volumes of systematic knowledge; and he would be the best commonwealth's man that could occasion the growth of 'two blades of grass where only one was seen before.'
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Mrs. Arber has now taken the hint and given us this monumental work on the grasses. * The work of course, has not come a ready-made and completed miracle from the brain of Mrs. Arber as Athena came from the head of Zeus. For more than a generation the public has been indebted to her for her monographs and studies on the grasses and other families: botanists have requisitioned her erudition and research on monocotyledons, water-plants, and indeed over the whole range of morphological studies. And now after more than thirty years of intensive study she has epitomised her researches in this masterly volume utilizing in her path all the scholarship and research which the great band of agrostologists from all over the world have placed at the disposal of the scientific scholar. But how few there are who could have used this mass of material with the wonderful skill and appropriateness which Mrs. Arber has displayed!
The study of the grasses embraces so much and is so far-reaching in its effects from the creation of the world to the flora of the New Jerusalem; from the diet of palaeolithic man to the food questions of President Roosevelt; from the latest news from Lord's or Wimbledon to the state of our digestion after a breakfast of shredded wheat or puffed rice-that any work dealing with the whole subject must stretch out into volumes. And in whatever
* The Gramineae: A Study of Cereal, Bamboo, and Grass, by Agnes Arber, M.A., D.SC., Cambridge at The University Press, price £1 1os, od,
July 1935.
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