

FROM SAVAGE TO CIVILIZED LIFE. 201 



work, asserts something to the same effect. " The fact that natural productions," 

 says he, " became so altered by cultivation as to lose their original characteristics, 

 is an incentive both to industry and ingenuity. We do not know what was the 

 original type of wheat, oats, or barley ; but we may reasonably conjecture, from 

 this very circumstance, that the Cerealia, in their wild state, were not well suited 

 to human sustenance." * 



The native country of wheat and rye is unknown (says PARMENTIER), though 

 cultivated over all Europe.f Barley (says Bosc) was brought from Upper Asia, 

 where OLIVIER has found it in a wild state.:): And DE CANDOLLE is of opinion, 

 that " when the introduction of cultivated plants is of a recent date, there is no 

 difficulty in tracing their origin .; but when it is of high antiquity, we are often 

 ignorant of the true country of the plants on which we feed." 



Lord KAMES, forgetting, or not being aware of, the fact that the Cerealia are 

 never found growing spontaneously, at least to serve to any extent as human 

 food, takes it for granted that wheat, rice, barley, &c., must have grown sponta- 

 neously from the creation ; and his reason for this opinion is certainly a pretty 

 strong one ; "for (says he) surely when agriculture first commenced, seeds of 

 these plants were not procured by a miracle." || 



The ancient historians, connecting the traditions of their deities with the 

 acknowledged benefit of the cultivated grains to man, have referred to Isis, the 

 Egyptian Ceres, as having found the vine, and wheat, and barley, growing wild 

 in the valley of Jordan, and introducing them into cultivation among the early 

 Egyptians.^ A late writer on the Cerealia, M. BUREAU DE LA MALLE, following 

 the indications of these ancient writers, fixes upon Nysa, in the plain of Jordan, 

 as probably the native country of the Cerealia, from whence they were spread 

 over all the civilized world, wherever man settled in his peregrinations. The Isis 

 of the Egyptians, transferred into the goddess of corn and husbandry, the Ceres 

 of the Greeks and Romans, the rites of her worship, it is said, indicated the pro- 

 gress of agriculture in the Roman Empire. 



But if agriculture was the third and most improved stage in the gradation of 

 human civilization, and if it be ascertained that the Cerealia grow nowhere spon- 

 taneously, Lord KAMES' s question, where the seeds should come from, when the 

 pastoral tribes took to cultivating the ground, is one that must puzzle the sup- 

 porters of the classical theory. If the spontaneous growth of these plants, to the 

 extent of serving for human food, be taken for granted, the necessity of agricul- 



* Nat. Hist, of Society, ii. 87. t Nouv. Diet. xxiv. 27. J Ibid. 



THEOPHKASTUS and PLINY give the Indies as the country of barley. 



|| Sketches of the History of Man, i. 45. 



U " In the East, it was in Babylonia, according to HERODOTUS and DIODORUS SICULUS, where the 

 grains grew naturally, the very place which may be regarded as the cradle of civilization." DBS LONG- 

 CHAMPS, in Diet, des Sciences Naturelles, torn. xix. Art. FROMENT. 



VOL. XV. PART I. 3 H 



