races of men, of all passionate temptation, or pure
delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowing of the Madonna, above
the

"Rosa sempiterna,
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol."

We have no time now for these, we must go on to the humblest group of
all, yet the most wonderful, that of the grass which has given us our
bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.

79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green
for man, and, under sunshine, give him bread, and, in their springing in
the early year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us (far more
than the new leaves of trees) the thought and word of "spring," divide
themselves broadly into three great groups--the grasses, sedges, and
rushes. The grasses are essentially a clothing for healthy and pure
ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself dry, and fit for all
cultivated pasture and corn. They are distinctively plants with round
and jointed stems, which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of
seed, independently emerging from them. The sedges are essentially the
clothing of waste and more or less poor or uncultivated soils, coarse in
their structure, frequently triangular in stem--hence called "acute" by
Virgil--and with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves.
Now, in both the sedges and grasses, the blossom has a common structure,
though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of double
husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes
projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process being
characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a moss were
a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a
new and distinct fructification. But the rushes differ wholly from the
sedge and grass in their blossom structure. It is not a dual cluster,
but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the grasses, and so
closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I think you will
find it convenient to group the rushes at once with that higher order,
to which, if you will for the present let me give the general name of
Drosidae, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of
them much more shortly and clearly.

80. These Drosidae, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture--
or at certain seasons--into dry ground. They are not among water-plants,
but the si