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The quantity of seed ingested and excreted by penned cattle from offerings of freshly cut kikuyu grass (Pennisetum clandestinum cv. Whittet) was measured during the autumn at Grafton, N.S.W. A mean 101-6 g of whole seed was ingested per head per day, of which 22-9 % was excreted. During 18 weeks, seedlings emerged from every dung pat formed from collected faeces. The number of seedlings represented 3-45 % of the whole seed ingested. The loss of covering structures from the seed during passage through the alimentary tract apparently reduced the 21-day germinability. INTRODUCTIONNew seeding cultivars of kikuyu grass (Pennisetum clandestinum) allow large scale sowing of pastures but establishment is risky in some areas which do not provide a suitable environment for emerging seedlings and in other areas which are inaccessible to cultivating and planting machinery. We have observed that kikuyu establishes well in dung pats and therefore excreted seed could be a simple and inexpensive means of overcoming these problems. There are reports of clover being disseminated by stock (e.g. Suckling, 1965) but there are few published reports relating to the spread of grasses this way. Cattle grazing kikuyu pasture on the North Coast region of N.S.W. cannot avoid ingesting seed because the mature, shortstalked spikelets are mixed throughout the leafy material. Furthermore, kikuyu sets seed almost all the year. The seed is not readily shed and accumulates in the sward. Therefore, the quantity of seed ingested by cattle may be considerable. We estimate that from 5 to 50 kg/ha of mature seed is available normally to cattle grazing seeding kikuyu on the North Coast region of New South Wales.The purpose of this study was to determine how much germinable seed was excreted by cattle eating freshly cut kikuyu and what effect passage through the alimentary tract had on seed condition and germinability.

Digitaria eriantha is a subtropical grass which is widely sown as a pasture species in South Africa and cultivars have recently been released in Australia . The species is variable in seed production and in other agronomic attributes . This paper describes a breeding program designed to combine the seed production of cv. Premier with the high productivity in winter-spring of an almost sterile genotype .Hybrids between the two accessions were either triploid and sterile, or diploid with low fertility . The F2 to F5 generations were selected intensively for fertility and, at two contrasting sites, for spring productivity, with both maternal and paternal selection . The F6 generation was grown as replicated swards and yield in spring, and fertility, were used for selection of elite F 5 plants to comprise the parents of a new cultivar (cv . Advance).In evaluation trials, spring dry matter production of Advance averaged 40% higher than that of Premier . On average, seed production of Advance was 11% lower than that of Premier and botanical fertility was consistently about half that of Premier . Experimental yields of cleaned seed of Advance were up to 138 kg/ha . In commerce, seed yields of Advance are likely to be lower than those of Premier unless higher inflorescence densities than Premier can be achieved .

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This article is forthcoming in a special issue of Criticism entitled 'Critical Bibliography and the Material Text', edited by Kate Ozment and Lisa Maruca]. Surface-Reading Paper as Feminist BibliographyHow can we read paper? What possibilities does such an activity afford? Are we to apply literary skills of analysis to interrogate a material surface, or to consider how paper's physical affordances shape rhetorical meaning? To "read" paper can mean both to consider the bibliographical evidence of its production, circulation, and use, and to analyze how paper is deployed as a rhetorical trope laden with "imaginative power." 1 Paper is a physical substance which, despite its generative capacity as a writing surface, exists in three dimensions. As Jonathan Senchyne notes, it is helpful to think of paper in layers. Senchyne categorizes these as the material (paper is made up of cellulose fibers meshed together), the representational (words and images on paper invite interpretation), and the "presence layer" (the traces of individuals who have contributed to its making). 2 I extend these categories to include the temporal palimpsest of paper's production (a sense that paper piles moments of its own biography upon one another), and the cumulative semiotics of that history (the hidden or less legible meanings which paper affords to text). Paper is layered in both a physical and a figurative sense; it demands both intellectual and haptic engagement from its readers. Those two modes of attending to paper collide when we attend to "material texts" in their richest sense. 3 In this article I read paper's layers both materially and metaphorically. Specifically, I take up metaphors of dimensionality: metaphors which traditionally operate in critical theory, yet which are realized and inflected by paper's material forms. The materiality of paper pulls G Wilson Writing Sample 2 towards a theoretical model of reading structured by depths and surfaces, and this article explores what happens when we bring the theoretical and the material together. The theoretical model of surfaces and depths has a history which stretches back to the 1970s, when "symptomatic reading" dominated English faculties in the United Kingdom and Northern America. Symptomatic reading is a Freudian inheritance which sees repression everywhere: its practitioners assumed that the "real" meaning of texts was hidden deep within. The proper work of a literary critic, therefore, was to plumb the depths of a text to triumphantly reveal what it was reluctant to give up. While a Freudian patient was assumed to be hiding past trauma, a text instead represses "the political conditions or forces bearing down at the moment of its making." 4 The critic, peering suspiciously past these conditions, restored to the surface what had previously been pushed beneath. Depths, in this scholarly mode, were a metaphorical environment for plucking out latent meanings which otherwise scuttled into the shadows, and for hauling into view the prior causes of a text's agenda. This model...