142 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



tame fruit (fruges, frumentum), which has come into the hands of 

 man; as we speak of tame animals in opposition to wild ones." 

 (Jacob Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, 1848, th. i. s. 62.) 

 It is certainly a very striking phenomenon, to find on one side of 

 our planet nations to whom flour or meal from small-eared grasses 

 (Hordeacese and Avenacese), and the use of milk, were completely 

 unknown, while the nations of almost all parts of the other hemi- 

 sphere cultivate the Cerealia, and rear milk-yielding animals. The 

 cultivation of different kinds of grasses may be said to afford a cha- 

 racteristic distinction between the two parts of the world. In the 

 New Continent, from 52 north to 46 south latitude, we see only 

 one species cultivated, viz. maize. In the Old Continent, on the 

 other hand, we find everywhere, from the earliest times of history, 

 the fruits of Ceres, wheat, barley, spelt or red wheat, and oats. 

 That wheat grew wild in the Leontine fields, as well as in several 

 other places in Sicily, was a belief entertained by ancient nations, 

 and is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus. (Lib. v. p. 199 and 232, 

 Wessel.) Ceres was found in the alpine meadow of Enna; and 

 Diodorus fables that " the inhabitants of the Atlantis were unac- 

 quainted with the fruits of Ceres, because they had separated from 

 the rest of mankind before those fruits had been shown to mortals." 

 Sprengel has collected several interesting passages which lead him 

 to think it probable that the greater part of our European kinds of 

 grain were originally wild in the northern parts of Persia and India, 

 namely, summer wheat in the country of the Musicanes, a province 

 in Northern India (Strabo, xv. 1017); barley (" antiquissimum fru- 

 mentum," as Pliny calls it, and which is also the only cereal with 

 which the Guanches of the Canaries were acquainted), according to 

 Moses of Chorene (Geogr. Armen. ed.. Whiston, 1736, p. 360), on 

 the Araxes or Kur in Georgia, and according to Marco Polo in Ba- 

 lascham in Northern India (Ramusio, vol. ii. p. 10); and spelt or 

 red wheat, near Hamadan. But these passages, as has been shown 

 by my keen-sighted friend and teacher Link, in an instructive criti- 

 cal memoir (Abhandl. de Berl. Akad. 1816, s. 123), stiU leave 

 much uncertainty. I also early regarded the existence of originally 

 wild kinds of grain in Asia as extremely doubtful, and viewed such 

 as might have been seen there as having become wild. (Essai sur la 



