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
Drosidæ, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of
them much more shortly and clearly.

80. These Drosidæ, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture--
or at certain seasons--into dry ground. They are not among water-plants,
but the signs of water resting among dry places. Many of the true
water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding
them; in the Drosidæ the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and
the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem
laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the