LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE I 37 



i. e., black wheat. ^ In this report about certain of the imported 

 seed wheat as immune from changeability into lolium, one almost 

 reads between Theophrastus' lines that he regarded the absence 

 from or presence of darnel in wheat fields to be due to the absence 

 or presence of darnel seed in the seed wheat at its sowing. There 

 is another passage in which the philosopher by implication seems 

 to question the wheat-darnel metamorphosis. With the ancient 

 husbandmen as with the modern it was usual to sow wheat either 

 in autumn or in spring. Theophrastus records this, and also 

 says that lolium always germinates in the autumn. He has 

 investigated the case, and gives some points of diagnosis by which 

 young plants of lolium may be distinguished from young plants 

 of wheat. 2 This autumnal germination and winter growing of the 

 lolium almost forces upon the thoughtful reader the inference 

 that if lolium occur in a field of wheat that was sown in spring, 

 it was already up and growing at the time the wheat was sown. 

 But there is one phase of this popularly credited metamorphosis 

 doctrine of which Theophrastus is so impatient that he openly 

 denies it. "Some say that barley changes to wheat sometimes, 

 and wheat to barley, and that in the same field. Such statements 

 are to be received as fables. Changes of that kind would be without 

 a cause. It is diversity of condition that induces change. "■' 



However skeptical Theophrastus may have been about all such 

 pretended metamorphoses, he had doubtless the usual prudential 

 reason for declining to assail them openly at every mention of 

 them. The belief in them was universal; and the time for the 

 elimination of such belief from even thoughtful minds was yet far 

 distant. We find it persisting with men of intellectual attainments 

 as late as the seventeenth century; at which time Scaliger, a most 

 learned commentator on Theophrastus, avers that he himself has 

 witnessed the transformation of wheat into barley and inti- 

 mates that the Greek might have done better than to discredit 

 the phenomenon. 4 



If it was the metamorphosis attending the development of the 

 individual reptile, and the insect, which helped to elevate to the 

 dignity of a quasi-rational belief the superstition about the change- 

 ability of wheat into lolium, it must be allowed that the reasoning 

 was not very cogent. The cases are not parallel. One is that 

 of the changes in an individual between youth and maturity. In 



I Melampyrum arvense, ace. to Sprengel, Hist. Rei Herb., vol. i, p. 96. 

 » Hist., Book i, ch. 7. ' Hist., Book ii, ch. 3. 



« See Stapel's edition of Theophrastus (1644), p. 78. 



