It is now more than thirty years since, at my suggestion, Ethel Sargant sowed the grains of wheat and maize which formed the starting-point of work upon the grass seedling which we did together. Before her death in 1918, I had turned to a more general examination of the monocotyledons; but in course of time I began to feel that it might be possible to get a clearer view of the questions arising out of this study, if I combined it with more intensive work upon some one of the great monocotyledonous orders. With this in view, I returned to the Gramineae, and for the last ten years they have seldom been far from my thoughts. My concern with them was at first purely morphological, but, as I came to visualise the nexus of problems presented by the life of bamboo and grass, as well as by the history of the cereals—so inextricably interwoven with the history of man—these wider fields began to fascinate me almost as much as the more limited and technical facies of my own special studies.

The grasses are a vast group, and a correspondingly vast mass of information about them has been accumulated by botanists. If this information were brought together and correlated, it would form a library rather than a volume. In the present book I have had no such encyclopaedic aim, but I have deliberately limited myself to those aspects of the subject which happen to make the greatest appeal to me personally.