GRAMINA, GRASSES; one of the seven tribes or natural families, into which all vegetables are distributed by Linnaeus in his Philosophia Botanica. They are defined to be plants which have very simple leaves, a jointed stem, a husky calyx termed gluma, and a single seed. This description includes the several sorts of corn as well as grasses. In Tournefort they constitute a part of the fifteenth class, termed apetalis; and in Linnaeus's sexual method, they are mostly contained in the second order of the third class, called triandria digyna.
This numerous and natural family of the grasses has engaged the attention and researches of several eminent botanists. The principal of these are, Ray, Monti, Micheli, and Linnaeus.
M. Monti, in his Catalogus stirpium agri Bononiensis graminum ac hujusmodi affinia complectens, printed at Bononia in 1719, divides the grasses from the disposition of their flowers, as Theophrastus and Ray have divided them before him, into three sections or orders.—These are, 1. Grasses having flowers collected in a spike. 2. Grasses having their flowers collected in a panicle or loose spike. 3. Plants that in their habit and external appearance are allied to the grasses.
This class would have been natural if the author had not improperly introduced sweet-rush, juncus, and arrow-headed grass, into the third section. Monti enumerates about 306 species of the grasses, which he reduces under Tournefort's genera; to these he has added three new genera.
Scheuchzer, in his Arifographia, published likewise in 1719, divides the grasses, as Monti, from the disposition of their flowers, into the five following sections: 1. Grasses with flowers in a spike, as phalaris, anthoxanthum, and frumentum. 2. Irregular grasses, as schoenanthus, and cornucopiae. 3. Grasses with flowers growing in a simple panicle or loose spike, as reed and millet. 4. Grasses with flowers growing in a compound panicle, or diffused spike, as oats and poa. 5. Plants by their habit nearly allied to the grasses, as cypress-grass, scirpus, linagrostis, rush, and scheuchzeria.
Scheuchzer has enumerated about four hundred species, which he describes with amazing exactness.
Micheli has divided the grasses into six sections, which contain in all 44 genera, and are arranged from the situation and number of the flowers.