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II. The Botanical History of the Genus Ehrharta. By Olof Swartz.,
M.D. F.M.L.S.
Read January 7, 1800.
Among the numerous botanical acquisitions made upwards of twenty years ago by Professor Thunberg during his extensive peregrinations in the southern part of Africa, was a kind of grass, whose difference from all before known, occasioned him to consider it as a peculiarly diftinct genus. It was afterwards described and delineated by him in the Memoirs of the Swedish Royal Academy for 1779, p. 216. t. 8. under the name of Ehrharta, in honour of F. Ehrhart, native of Berne in Switzerland, once a pupil of the elder Linnaeus, and His Britannic Majesty's botanist at Hanover; a man of great merit in the science of botany, and who is well known by his labours, particularly in the history of grasses and the cryptogamous tribe.
The same year this genus was adopted amongst the Nova Graminum Genera, arranged in a dissertation under the presidency of the younger Linnaeus at Upsala.
In the mean time, the Abbe Rozier published in his Journal de Phyfique, 1779, p. 225. a botanical description made by L. Richard, of a kind of grass called by Trochera striata, of which, notwithstanding the indifferent figure he has given, it is not difficult to perceive the near affinity with the former.
Several years afterwards the President of the Linnaean Society described in the first fasciculus of his Plantarum Icones haSlenus ineditae,
