662 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PEDIGKEE OF WHEAT. 



By Peofessoe GRANT ALLEN. 



WHEAT ranks by origin as a degenerate and degraded lily. Such 

 in brief is the proposition which this paper sets out to prove, 

 and which the whole course of evolutionary botany tends every day 

 more and more fully to confirm. By thus from the very outset plac- 

 ing clearly before our eyes the goal of our argument, we shall be able 

 the better to understand as we go whither each item of the cumulative 

 evidence is really tending. We must endeavor to start with the sim- 

 plest forms of the great group of plants to which the cereals and the 

 other grasses belong, and we must try to see by what steps this primi- 

 tive type gave birth, first to the brilliantly colored lilies, next to the 

 degraded rushes and sedges, and then to the still more degenerate 

 grasses, from one or other of whose richer grains man has finally de- 

 veloped his wheat, his rice, his millet, and his barley. We shall thus 

 trace throughout the whole pedigree of wheat from the time when its 

 ancestors first diverged from the common stock of the lilies and the 

 water-plantains, to the time when savage man found it growing wild 

 among the untilled plains of prehistoric Asia, and took it under his 

 special protection in the little garden-plots around his wattled hut, 

 whence it has gradually altered under his constant selection into the 

 golden grain that now covers half the lowland tilth of Europe and 

 America. There is no page in botanical history more full of genuine 

 romance than this ; and there is no page in which the evidence is 

 clearer or more convincing for those who will take the easy trouble to 

 read it aright. 



The fixed point from which we start is the primitive and undiffer- 

 entiated ancestral flowering plant. Into the previous history of the 

 line from which the cereals are ultimately descended, I do not propose 

 here to enter. It must suffice for our present purpose to say dogmat- 

 ically that the flowering plants as a whole derive their origin from a 

 still earlier flowerless stock, akin in many points to the ferns and the 

 club-mosses, but differing from them in the relatively important part 

 borne in its economy by the mechanism for cross-fertilization. The 

 earliest flowering plant of the great monocotyledonous division (the 

 only one with which we shall here have anything to do) started ap- 

 parently by possessing a very simple and inconspicuous blossom, with 

 a central row of three ovaries, surrounded by two or more rows of 

 three stamens each, without any colored petals or other ornamental 

 adjuncts of any sort. I need hardly explain even to the unbotanical 

 reader at the present day that the ovaries contain the embryo seeds, 

 and that they only swell into fertile fruits after they have been duly 

 impregnated by pollen from the stamens, preferably those of another 



