Chap. 12.] WHEAT. 25 



CHAP. 12. WHEAT. 



There are numerous kinds of wheat which have received 

 their names from the countries where they were first produced. 

 For my part, however, I can compare no kind of wheat to 

 that of Italy either for whiteness or weight, qualities for which 

 it is more particularly distinguished : indeed it is only with 

 the produce of the more mountainous parts of Italy that the 

 foreign wheats can be put in comparison. Among these the 

 wheat of Bosotia' 28 occupies the first rank, that of Sicily the 

 second, and that of Africa the third. The wheats of Thrace, 

 Syria, and, more recently, of Egypt, used to hold the third rank 

 for weight, these facts having been ascertained through the 

 medium of the athletes; whose powers of consumption, equal 

 to those of beasts of burden, have established the gradations in. 

 weight, as already stated. Greece, too, held the Pontic 29 wheat 

 in high esteem ; but this has not reached Italy as yet. Of 

 all the varieties of grain, however, the Greeks gave the pre- 

 ference to the kinds called dracontion, strangia, and Selinusium, 

 the chief characteristic of which is a stem of remarkable thick- 

 ness : it was this, in the opinion of the Greeks, that marked 

 them as the peculiar growth of a rich soil. On the other hand, 

 they recommended for sowing in humid soils an extremely 

 light and diminutive species of grain, with a remarkably thin 

 stalk, known to them as speudias, and standing in need of an 

 abundance of nutriment. Such, at all events, were the opi- 

 nions generally entertained in the reign of Alexander the Great, 

 at a time when Greece was at the height of her glory, and the 

 most powerful country in the world. Still, however, nearly 

 one hundred and forty-four years before the death of that 

 prince we find the poet Sophocles, in his Tragedy of " Trip- 

 tolemus," praising the corn of Italy before all others. The 

 passage, translated word for word, is to the following effect : 



"And favour'd Italy grows white with hoary wheat." 



And it is this whiteness that is still one of the peculiar merits 

 of the Italian wheat ; a circumstance which makes me the more 

 surprised to find that none of the Greek writers of a later 

 period have made any reference to it. 



28 From Theophrastus, De Causis, B. iv. 



29 That of the Ukraine and its vicinity, which is still held in high esteem. 



