28 SEED-FOOD. 



special organs as a reserve for the future, seed- 

 food is the most compact, as it is the freest from 

 water; for the same reason it is least liable to 

 change with long keeping, and from the larger 

 proportion of albuminoids contained it is the most 

 nutritious. This has led man from the earliest 

 times to use seeds as the chief source of their veg- 

 etable food ; many of the very kinds whose seed- 

 food we appropriate nourished men ages before the 

 pyramids were built. The evidences which have 

 come down to us of their earliest use are fragmen- 

 tary, but they clearly show that these productions 

 must have been of the utmost value to the men of 

 those days, and they are well calculated to impress 

 the mind with a sense of the importance to human 

 life of plants which have afforded the best food 

 from prehistoric times to the present day. 



We learn from De Candolle that some of the 

 most ancient Egyptian monuments, older than the 

 Hebrew Scriptures, show the cultivation of wheat 

 already established, and when the Egyptians or 

 Greeks speak of its origin, they attribute it to the 

 mythical personages Isis, Ceres, or Triptolemus. 

 One interesting discovery of the Egyptologists was 

 the finding of a grain of wheat embedded in a 

 brick of the pyramid of Dash our, to which the 



