Perennial grasses with usually flat leaf-blades and showy, often silvery white, panicles, the axis short or elongated. Racemes usually numerous, the internodes of the rachis and the pedicels with manifestly thickened margins, the median portion thin and translucent, the margins ciliate with long hairs. Spikelets dorsally compressed. Sessile spikelets of 4 scales, perfect, or rarely the lower pair or pairs staminate or empty; first scale 2-keeled, the margins narrowly inrolled; second scale 1-nerved; fourth scale stipelike, the blade wanting, merging into a usually geniculate perfect, rarely imperfect, awn, or the awn rarely wanting. Pedicellate spikelets awnless, staminate and similar to the sessile ones, or empty and smaller than them. Stamens 3. Styles distinct. Stigmas plumose. [Greek, in reference to the hairs surrounding the spikelets.]

A genus of about 15 species. Besides the following several others occur in the United States. Type species: Andropogon Torreyanus Steud.

1. Amphilophis Saccharoides (Sw.) Nash. Torrey's Beard-Grass

Fig. 273

Andropogon saccharoides Sw. Prodr. 26. 1788. Andropogon glaucus Torr. Ann. Lye. N. Y. 1: 153. 1824.

Not Muhl. 1817. Andropogon Torreyanus Steud. Nomencl. Ed. 2, 93. 1841. Andropogon saccharoides var. Torreyanus Hack, in DC.

Monog. Phan. 6: 495. 1889.

Culms erect, 1 1/2°-3 1/2° tall, simple or branched, glabrous, the nodes naked or barbed; sheaths glabrous, rarely pubescent, more or less glaucous; blades 3'-10' long, 2"-4" wide, long-acuminate, smooth and glabrous towards the base, scabrous on margins and at the apex, glaucous; racemes 1'-1 1/2' long, in a terminal long-exserted panicle 2'-4' long; joints of the rachis with a thin translucent median line; outermost scale of sessile spikelet 1 1/2"-2" long, about equalling the terminal hairs of the radiis-joints, lanceolate, acute, pubescent at base with long silky hairs; awn 4"-8" long, spiral, bent, scabrous; pedicellate spikelet reduced to a single narrow scale.

In dry soil, Missouri to Kansas and Colorado, northern South America, and in Jamaica. Feather Sedge-grass. Aug.-Sept.