204 THE RING OF NATURE 



hedge it will send its zigzag stems up ten feet 

 and then blossom and set seed. A piece of cooch 

 that had been dried for several years came green, 

 and began to grow again when it was put into the 

 ground. 



The tender wheat has little chance without the 

 assistance of man against this villainous compound 

 of Artful Dodger and Uriah Heep, this creeping, 

 rampant grass. Yet the cooch is of the nearest 

 possible affinity to the noble wheat itself. Some 

 of the first wheat grains cultivated by man have 

 been found on the hearths of the ancient lake- 

 dwellers in Switzerland. Even failing them, a 

 microscopic examination of our wheat shows with 

 reasonable certainty that it is descended from the 

 goat grass, a cooch that still grows in Italy. The 

 goat grass of the lake-dwellings was also cultivated 

 in India, and may have come thence rather more 

 like wheat when the Aryan invasion came into 

 Europe. 



It is not surprising if the old primitive wheats 

 of twenty thousand years ago, or, as recent theory 

 puts it, of seven hundred thousand years ago, 

 have disappeared. Very great improvement of 

 the wheat is a fact of living memory, and the 

 school of the wheat may now be said to have been 

 transferred from England to America. In the 

 experimental centres of the United States and 

 Canada, hundreds of different varieties are tried 

 annually, and, sad to say, the pupils from England 

 no longer stand at the top of the class. The 



