Tbavers.— (>n Food Plant* in different Ages, 85 



other rude implements) by the Maoris ; but he points out, never- 

 theless, that the products obtained from this rude cultivation 

 were generally excellent — a fact known to ourselves as regards 

 the Maoris — because, as a rule, they always used rich virgin 

 soil, or soil that had long lain fallow, for growing their crops 

 in. 



Dr. Keller refers us to a treatise by Professor Heer on the 

 plants used by the Lake-dwellers, for information as to their 

 husbandry, and it is from that treatise, and from the investiga- 

 tions of Alphonse de Candolle and others, that I have prepared 

 the following resume of the subject. The remains of plants, 

 from which Professor Heer drew his conclusions, were found 

 lying in the lake mud below the sites of the various settlements, 

 or buried under peat, several feet thick, formed since the settle- 

 ments ceased to exist. They were found mixed with stones, 

 fragments of pottery, domestic instruments, charcoal, ashes, 

 and other unmistakable evidences of human occupation, and 

 consisted of remains of cereals, of weeds usually associated with 

 cornfields, of culinary vegetables, of fruits and berries, of nuts, 

 of oil-producing and aromatic plants, of bast and fibrous plants, 

 of plants used for dyeing, of mosses and ferns, of fungi for 

 kindling fire, and of water and marsh plants. Of the plants 

 used for food the cereals were evidently the most important, and 

 consisted of a now extinct form of wheat called the " lake-dwelling 

 wheat," and of a small-grained six-rowed barley, also extinct ; 

 whilst the spelt (which at present is one of the most important 

 cereals,) and the oat did not appear until the Bronze age, and rye 

 was entirely unknown. With the exception of a pea no culinary 

 vegetable can certainly be mentioned as belonging to this period, 

 but a small bean and a field lentil appear during the Bronze 

 period. As to fruits, they appear to have been possessed of an 

 abundance of crab apples, and in the later periods of a larger 

 but still inferior species of apple, which may have been the 

 result of cultivation ; of a small and inferior description of 

 pear, found associated with the relics of the Bronze period ; of 

 a plum closely allied to the bullace ; of sloes, bird cherries, rasp- 

 berries, blackberries, and strawberries, whilst it seems that they 

 also used the fruits of the dog-rose and elder. Beech nuts were 

 found in large quantities, and cakes, of the seed of the garden or 

 field-poppy and carraway seeds, occurred amongst the remains 

 of some of the more recent settlements. 



Heer and de Candolle both remark that the Lake-dwellers 

 could not have had any close connection with the people of 

 Eastern Europe, otherwise they would, without doubt, have 

 cultivated rye, and that the plants actually cultivated show that 

 their chief intercourse must have been with the people of the 

 Mediterranean basin. Every species of corn which they used 

 had certainly come from that quarter, for it was identical with 



