A FEW WORDS ABOUT EATABLES. 6 77 



where, except among the pulse family. The experiments conducted 

 by the Agricultural Society in their College Garden at Cirencester 

 have also shown that careful selection will produce large and rich 

 seeds from JEgilops ovata, considerably resembling true wheat, after 

 only a few years' cultivation. 



Primitive man, of course, did not proceed nearly so fast as that. 

 Of the very earliest attempts at cultivation of JEgilops, all traces are 

 now lost, but we can gather that its tillage must have continued in 

 some unknown Western Asiatic region for some time before the neo- 

 lithic period ; for in that period we find a rude early form of wheat 

 already considerably developed among the scanty relics of the Swiss 

 lake-dwellings. The other cultivated plants by which it is there ac- 

 companied and the nature of the garden-weeds which had followed in 

 its wake point back to Central or Western Asia as the land in which its 

 tillage had first begun. From that region the Swiss lake-dwellers 

 brought it with them to their new home among the Alpine valleys. 

 It differed much already from the wild JEgilopis in size and stature ; 

 but at the same time it was far from having attained the stately di- 

 mensions of our modern corn. The ears found in the lake-dwellings 

 are shorter and narrower than our own ; the spikelets stand out more 

 horizontally, and the grains are hardly more than half the size of their 

 modern descendants. The same thing is true in analogous ways with 

 all the cultivated fruits or seeds of the stone age ; they are invariably 

 much smaller and poorer than their representatives in existing fields 

 or gardens. From that time to this the process of selection and ame- 

 lioration has been constant and unbroken, until in our own day the 

 descendants of these little degraded lilies, readapted to new functions 

 under a fresh regime, have come to cover almost all the cultivable 

 plains in all civilized countries, and supply by far the largest part of 

 man's food in Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Macmillarfs 

 Magazine. 



-**-*"- 



A FEW WOEDS ABOUT EATABLES. 



By C. B. KADCLIFFE, M. D. 



/CLERIC US. I have had a good breakfast. 



^- / Medicus. So have I. 



C. I should not say so. I have emptied the toast-rack, and helped 

 myself to three or four slices of cold roast-beef ; you have had some 

 galantine * with brown bread and butter, and not much of them. But 

 I suppose it is all right. I am going in for a hard day's boating ; you 



* Something like hcad-cbeese, but made of white meat. 



