GRASSES a large part of the animal creation is made up of grass-eaters. Carnivorous creatures live upon the grass-eaters. So the saying: "All flesh is grass," is literally true, in the long run. The commonest plant in the world is grass. It covers the bare earth, even when trees and other larger plants make a shade over it. Grass fills in the chinks, and makes the earth green and beautiful, except in desert places.
The Grass Family embraces all the cultivated grains, whose seeds make flour for bread of many kinds. It covers the pasture grasses that are made into hay to feed stock in cold winter climates. The blue-grass, that makes Kentucky famous, and is the favorite lawn grass in all our cities, is a wild species. Its nutritious leaves and stems make the richest kind of pasture and hay for stock.
Timothy and red-top, European wild grasses, we cultivate for hay and pasture. Each country
has developed its own types of forage plants.
The stems of grasses are round. Three-cornered stems belong to the sedges, which are more near to the rushes, that grow in wet ground. Sedges are woven into matting by the Japanese. Rush matting is made in many countries.
A reed called Papyrus, that used to be cultivated in the Delta of the Nile, was more important in the early ages of civilization than it is now. Sheets made of thin, overlapping strips of the pith formed the first paper used for the manuscript records. Other materials have quite superseded Papyrus in the manufacture of paper, but its name is preserved for all time in our English word, paper. We see the plant occasionally in water gardens, and in pools where goldfish live outdoors.