Grass
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Grass. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the most useful family of plants. While it is true that in a torrid climate people could exist on breadfruit and water, it is still true that the family of grasses does more to support human life and is more nearly indispensable than any other family of plants within or without the tropics. Wild grasses, timothy, redtop, blue grass , wheat, oats, rye, barley, rice, Indian corn, broom corn, sorghum, reeds, cane, and bamboo are grasses. Grasses may be told from sedges by their stems. Grass stems are usually round, hollow, and jointed, with leaves or blades growing on two sides. Sedge stems are usually three-angled, solid, without joints, and with leaves or blades on three sides. Sedges resemble grasses and are cut for hay, but they are not considered valuable. Timothy and redtop are the most valuable of the forage grasses. Kentucky blue grass, which extends its range far into Canada, is the best American pasture and lawn grass. A running, underground, fleshy root-stock enables it to extend in hard ground and to withstand drought. When dry weather has killed the plant proper and the pasture is to all appearances dead, these thread-like fleshy rootstocks lie quiet like potatoes in a cellar, only to send up a carpet of green with marvellous quickness after a refreshing rain. So far as withstanding drought is concerned, it is better not to sprinkle often. Frequent surface sprinkling induces the root-stocks to lie near the surface where they may be killed by the hot sun of a few days neglect. Blue grass grows early and grows late. It is a boon to cattle and to dairy interests. Bermuda grass is the best in the South. See also separate articles on the chief members of the family as OATS; BAMBOO; EXPORTS; TIMOTHY; BLUE GRASS. Reed grass. Grass Nard or mat grass. Grass
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the botanical order Graminaceæ, a very extensive and important order of endogenous plants, comprising about 250 genera and 4,500 species, including many of the most valuable pasture plants, all those which yield grain, the sugar-cane, bamboo, etc. In its popular use the term grass is chiefly applied to the pasture grasses as distinct from the cereals, etc.; but it is also applied to some herbs, which are not in any strict sense grasses at all, e. g., ribgrass, scurvy, and whitlow grass. GRASS HEMP. See SISAL.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's counted about 250 genera and 4,500 species in the order "Graminaceæ"; botanists now put the family, renamed Poaceae, at roughly 780 genera and some 12,000 species, making it the fifth largest plant family. Collier's word "endogenous" for what we now call monocots has gone, and grasses and sedges, which Aiton's distinguished by round hollow jointed stems versus solid three-angled ones, are today grouped as close relatives in the order Poales. Two things later research added: the discovery that many tropical grasses, including maize and sugar cane, use the more efficient C4 pathway of photosynthesis, worked out in the 1960s; and phytoliths found in fossilised dinosaur dung in India, reported in 2005, which pushed the family's origin back into the Cretaceous, long before the grasslands that spread in the Miocene. The practical advice in Aiton's, that Kentucky bluegrass rules northern lawns and Bermuda grass the South, and that light frequent sprinkling breeds shallow, heat-vulnerable roots, is still what turf specialists say.
Written for this edition, 2026.