ILLUSTRATIONS (27). CEREALS. 129 



mum frumentum, as Pliny terms it, and which was also the 

 only cereal known to the Guansches of the Canaries, originated, 

 according to Moses of Chorene,* on the banks of the Araxes 

 or Kur in Georgia, and according to Marco Polo in Balascham, 

 in Northern India ;f and Spelt originated in Hamadan. 



My intelligent friend and teacher, Link, has however shown 

 in a comprehensive and critical treatise,^ that these passages 

 are open to much doubt. In a former essay of my own, I 

 expressed doubts regarding the existence of wild cereals in 

 Asia, and considered them to have become wild. Reinhold 

 Forster, who before his voyage with Captain Cook made an 

 expedition for purposes of natural history into the south of 

 Russia by order of the Empress Catherine, reported that the 

 two-lined summer barley (Hordeum distichon) grew wild 

 near the confluence of the Samara and the Volga. At the 

 end of September in the year 1829, Ehrenberg and myself 

 also herborised on the Samara, during our journey from 

 Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the Caspian Sea. The 

 quantity of wheat and rye plants growing wild on uncultivated 

 ground in this district was certainly very remarkable; but 

 the plants did not appear to us to differ from the ordinary 

 kinds. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin a species of rye, 

 Secale fragile, that had been gathered on the Kirghis Steppe, 

 and which Marshal Bieberstein for some time conjectured to 

 be the mother plant of our cultivated rye, Secale cereals. 

 Michaux's herbarium does not show (according to Achill 

 Richard's testimony), that Spelt (Triticum spelta} grows wild 

 at Hamadan in Persia, as Olivier and Michaux have been sup- 

 posed to maintain. More confidence is due to the recent 

 accounts obtained through the unwearied zeal of the intelligent 

 traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found a large quantity 

 of rye (Secale cereale var. /3, pectinatd] in the Pontic Moun- 

 tains, at heights of more than 5000 or 6000 feet above the 

 level of the sea, on spots where this species of grain had 

 not within the memory of the inhabitants been previously 

 cultivated. k ' Its appearance here is the more important," 

 he remarks, "because with us this grain never propagates 



* Geogr. Armen., ed. Whiston, 1736, p. 360. 



+ Ramusio, vol. ii. p. 10. 



J Abhandl. der Berl. Alcad. 1816, s. 123. 



Essai sur la Geographic des Plantes, 1805, p. 28. 



