ON THE MIGRATION OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 319 
with undoubted certainty, nor can we state their parent countries. This 
must be received as evidence of vast antiquity of cultivation. Ears of 
wheat and of barley have been found in the oldest Egyptian tombs of the 
same peculiar species or varieties as those cultivated in the same 
country at the present day; aud in the Book of Genesis, in the poems 
of Homer, and in the oldest of the Hindu Vedas, these cereals are as 
familiarly referred to as they are now. Wheat and barley must have 
been well known to the Egyptians before the earliest of the pyramids 
was built, for a people feeding on roots and fruits could not have pos- 
sessed the power or the skill indispensable to the construction of 
these stupendous monuments. The first culture of these corns, there- 
fore, carries us very far back in the history of man himself. There is 
no good reason to think that wheat and barley may not have been just 
as early cultivated in Persia, India, China, and Japan, as in Egypt 
itself, although we have not the same satisfactory evidence of their 
having been so; and the same may be asserted of rice for tropical Asia, 
and even for maize in the case of the constructors of the temples of 
Mexico, and the builders of Palenque. 
Millet, derived from the Latin milium, and coming to us indirectly 
in its present form through the French, is a common term for all the 
smaller cultivated cereals. These, of many species, are largely culti- 
vated in all the warm countries of Europe and Asia, from the 40t 
degree of latitude to the equator. The most frequent of them belong 
to the genera Panicum and Sorghum, but they are not confined to these 
two. The late Dr. Hugh Falconer told me that the number of kinds 
of millet cultivated in the plains or mountains of India is no fewer 
than twenty-five. In Asiatic countries they form a large portion of 
the bread of the humbler classes. As to the history of their culture, 
it goes far beyond all record, and is probably of equal antiquity with 
that of wheat, barley, or rice. Itis impossible to fix the parent country 
of any of these millets, and the probability is that they are indigenous 
in many, for we find them growing with the facility and vigour of 
native plants in such remote and unconnected regions as Italy, India, 
China, and Japan. Some of them are certainly found in a wild state, 
and even crops of some of these are occasionally gathered. In some 
parts of Asia, such as its islands, they seem to have been in a good 
measure superseded by the far superior corn, the American maize. — 
great number of pulses, or leguminous plants, have been culti- 
