Parting the grasses and looking more closely you may trace the branching of their shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of their mist of flowers, the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the yellow dangling stamens, and feathery pistils.

The chaffy scales of the calyx in Xeranthemum, and in a species of Dianthus, and the glume in some alpine grasses, and the scales of the ament in the salix rosea, rose willow, grow into leaves; and produce other kinds of monsters.

A corn plant consists of a culm bearing at its head a spike, which, when it is not mutilated, has, as in barley and wheat, three parts, namely: the grain, the glume and the beard, not to speak of the sheath which contains the spike while it is being formed.

The grain is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume is its hull and the beard those long thin needles which grow out of the glume.

The grain is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume is its hull and the beard those long thin needles which grow out of the glume.

Thus as the glume is the pontifical robe of the grain, the beard is its apex.

The beard and the grain are well known to almost every one, but the glume to very few: indeed I know only one book in which it is mentioned, the translation which Ennius made of the verses of Evhemerus.

The etymology of the word gluma seems to be from glubere, to strip, because the grain must be stripped from this hull: and by a like derivation the hull of the fig which we eat is called a glume.

The beard we call arista because it is the first part of the corn to dry (arescere), while we call the grain granum from the fact that it is produced (gerere), for we plant corn to produce grain, not glumes or beards, just as vines are planted to produce grapes, not tendrils.