318 MEETING OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
It would not be until, through increase of population, and wild 
plants had become scarce, that the ingenuity of man would be stimu- 
lated to multiply them by cultivation. We have an example of the 
early steps in this progress in the condition of society among the 
South-Sea islanders, both fair and negro, who, when first seen by civi- 
lized man, were found cultivating the yam, the taro, or esculent Cala- 
dium, the batata, the cocoa-palm, the banana, and the breadfruit, but 
no cereal and no pulse. . 
In the present paper, I propose to confine myself to the ethnological 
bearings of bread-plants, and begin with the most important of them, 
the cereals. These consist of wheat, barley, rye, oats, rice, maize, and 
several millets. Rye and oats are plants confined for the most part to 
Europe, but wheat and barley embrace a far wider range, for they 
extend to all the temperate, and even to the subtropical regions of 
the whole world, from Spain to Japan, while within the last 350 years 
they have been transferred, through the enterprise of European nations, 
to the corresponding climates of America and Australia, in neither of 
which did any one of the principal cerealia of Europe previously exist 
either in a wild or cultivated state. Rice is the principal cereal of all 
the tropical and subtropical countries of Asia, from Persia to Japan, 
and its culture has been extended to Europe only within the historical 
period. Maize is an exclusive product of America, and was as un- 
known to the Old World, before the first voyage of Columbus, as to- 
bacco or the pine-apple. With a wider geographical range than any 
other of the cereals, it has invaded every country of the Old World, 
from the 50th degree of latitude, and is now the bread of many mil- 
lions of people whose forefathers lived in ignorance of -its existence. 
It is extensively eultivated im the southern provinces of China, in 
Japan, and in the islands of the Malay and Philippine archipelagoes- 
Speke and Grant found it the principal corn in parts of the interior of 
Africa which the feet of white man had never trodden before their own, 
and in Italy and Spain it was a frequent crop within fifty years of the 
discovery of the New World. This wide and rapid extension maize 
owed to its adaptation to diversities of soil and climate, its hardihood, 
with eonsequent facility of propagation, and its eminent fecundity. 
With the exception of rice, which is found growing wild in some 
parts of India, but which yet may have sprung from the seeds of the 
cultivated plant, not one of the cereals now enumerated can be traced 
