Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 6 (1802).djvu/63

Rh t. 9. a new species, under the name of Ehrharta panicea, detected in the year 1776 by Sonnerat, at the Cape of Good Hope.

In the second fasciculus of the same valuable work, the author enriches the genus Ehrharta with two other species, the E. longiflora and E. calycina, the latter of which had, some time before, appeared in the ''Linnean Suppl. Plantarum'', p. 108. where it is called Aira capensis.

But the great external similarity of this genus with that of Melica, has made me anxious to examine, with the leave of my highly esteemed friend Prof. Thunberg, into several of those species preserved in his museum, which we find not only inlisted in the ''Suppl. Plant''. under the generic names of Melica and Aira, but even those inserted in the first part of his own ''Prodr. Florae Capensis''; and to my very great satisfaction, I have had the good fortune to detect some possessing all the characteristic marks of the genus in question. I am happy to acknowledge my high obligations to Prof. Thunberg, by whole generous communications I have thus been able to attain a tolerably complete knowledge of several beautiful kinds, which will still more help to settle the limits of this most distinict genus, and become so many cypresses round the urn of a man untimely lost for science, whose name will be preserved by them in the annals of botany.

Having now had the opportunity of studying and comparing so many species, I venture to offer more accurate characters to form the natural and genuine difference of the Ehrharta from other genera of the same natural order, the character hitherto given in the ''Suppl. Plant''. and in the above-mentioned dissertation, being rather a specific description of the only species on which this new genus was first founded.

Radix fibrosa 1. rarius bulbosa.

Culmi conserti, simplices l, subdivisi, subinde ramosi, articulati, subge- niculati.