26 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
view. The explorers probably had very slight acquaintance with 
cultivated grain, and might on this account more readily confuse this 
wild rice with wheat. ‘There is not, however, the slightest foundation 
for the theory, that this *wild wheat' was Indian corn, a view which 
has been advanced by certain writers. Indian corn was a grain entirely 
unknown to the explorers, and they could not by any possibility have 
confused it with wheat, even if they had found this corn growing wild, 
a conjecture for which there is absolutely no support whatever." ! 
No one who is familiar with Indian Corn and with Wheat will 
question the conclusion, that they are not likely to be mistaken for each 
other; but, until reading the above note, we should have supposed, 
also, that there was no possibility of anyone confusing Wheat and 
Wild Rice. Wheat is a narrow-leaved, comparatively low grass, with 
a subcylindrie or finger-shaped close spike of grains (either with or 
without long awns or * beard") and it is cultivated in fields or dryish 
meadows; but Wild Rice (which, by the way, is confined to North 
America and therefore, like Indian Corn, “was a grain entirely un- 
known to the explorers”) is one or our largest grasses, ordinarily three 
to eight feet high, with leaves an inch or more wide, and with the 
flowers and grains in a loose open panicle 12 to 16 inches long and 2 
to 6 inches in diameter. Furthermore, Wild Rice (Zizania) is an 
aquatic plant, growing in the margins of lakes and quiet streams, 
especially in the region of the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi; 
and, though it occurs locally in a few New England rivers, it attains 
its easternmost known limit in the lower reaches of the St. John in 
New Brunswick, being apparently unknown in Nova Scotia. 
Although to a botanist there seems as little ground for assuming that 
the Wheat (“hveiti”) of the sagas was Wild Rice as there is for identify- 
ing it with Indian Corn, there are, among the more than two hundred 
indigenous grasses which are found near the coast from New England 
northward, ten? or more species which, in superficial aspect, are 
closely similar to the true Wheat (Triticum vulgare). Of these ten or 
more native grasses the species of Agropyron demand brief discussion, 
for by many authors they are united with Triticum, the true Wheat; 
and in modern works upon the Norwegian and Icelandic floras they 
! Reeves, The Finding of Wineland the Good, 174 (1890). 
? Agropyron (or Triticum) caninum, A. (or T.) pungens, A. (or T.) tenerum, and A. 
(or T.) violaceum, Elymus arenarius, E. canadensis, E. mollis, and E. virginicus, Hordeum 
jubatum, and Ammophila arenaria, 
