ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 143 



Geographic des Plantes, 1805, p. 28.) Reinhold Forster, who before 

 his voyage with Captain Cook, made by order of the Empress Ca- 

 therine an expedition into Southern Russia for purposes of natural 

 history, reported that the two-stalked summer barley (Hordeum 

 distichon), grew wild near the junction of the Samara and the Volga. 

 At the end of the month of September, 1829, Ehrenberg and my- 

 self, on our journey from Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the 

 Caspian, also herborized on the banks of the Samara. We were, 

 indeed, struck with the quantity of wheat and rye plants growing in 

 what might be called a wild state in the uncultivated ground, but 

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

 ones. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin a kind of rye, Secale 

 fragile, gathered on the Kirgis Steppe, and which Marschall von 

 Bieberstein regarded for a time as the original or mother plant of 

 our cultivated rye, Secale cereale. Although Olivier and Michaux 

 speak of spelt (Triticum spelta) as growing wild at Hamadan in 

 Persia, A chill Richard does not consider that Michaux' s herbarium 

 bears out this statement. Greater confidence is due to the most 

 recent accounts obtained by the unwearied zeal of a highly-informed 

 traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found much rye (Secale cereale, 

 var. j3, pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, at elevations of upwards 

 of five or six thousand feet, in places where within the memory of 

 the inhabitants no grain of the kind had ever been cultivated. Koch 

 remarks, that the circumstance is " the more important, because with 

 us this grain never propagates itself spontaneously." In the Schir- 

 wan parts of the Caucasus, Koch collected a kind of barley which 

 he calls " Hordeum spontaneum," and considers to be the originally 

 wild " Hordeum zeoeriton" of Linnaeus. (Carl Koch Beitrage zur 

 Flora des Orients, heft i. s. 139 and 142.) 



A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated 

 wheat in New Spain. He had found three grains of it amongst the 

 rice which had been brought from Spain for provision for the army. 

 In the Franciscan convent at Quito, I saw preserved as a relic the 

 earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sowed there by 

 the Franciscan monk Fray Jodoco Rixi, a native of Ghent in Flan- 

 ders. The first sowing had been made in front of the convent, on 

 what is now the Plazuela de San Francisco, after cutting down the 



