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is designed to answer the basic question about what can be found in the wider sense of the word so the plant can be classified and again identified by simple observational methods as inevitably are used by non-specialists and by floristic botanists who do not require more exact information. Though this fundamental approach needs categories as do all kinds of studies, these may be rather arbitrarily chosen and hardly need to be made closely defined.

When scientific knowledge advances, so the requirements of exactness the descriptive approach is supplemented by the comparative. This is first focused around the grouping or classification because we need to know what pattern or system an assembly of plants has in common, and what distinct types there are at various levels of characterization. In the wheatgrasses, this leads to a somewhat confused state, since a considerable degree of arbitrariness cannot be avoided as long as the morphological method is supplemented only by anatomical and geographical considerations that hardly are sufficient for conclusions as to physical relationship the grade and physical relationship. Some botanists following the comparative method concluded that many of the more than 100 species that were discovered during the century following discovery were correctly classified in small and monophyletic genera of which more than fifty were described, whereas others used the one method or basis for bringing this variation into only the genus Distichlis Krause used the one method as a basis for bringing all the wheatgrasses into a single genus, which he called Festuca, a legitimate one also according the nomenclatural rules of his time. More moderate lapses, however, selected a few distinct morphological traits as a basis for placing all these species in the genus Festuca, small genus Triticeae, Secale et Elymus of the large genus Hordeum, Agropyron et Elymus, an arrangement that was generally accepted all over the world until half a century ago it still is predominant in even the modern manuals for the English-speaking nations though not in the conservative Flora Europaea. Implicit in this system was the idea of physical