190 The Outline of Science 



sations of Babylonia, Egypt, Crete, Greece, and Rome were 

 largely based on wheat, and it is highly probable that the first 

 great wheatfields were in the fertile land between the Tigris and 

 the Euphrates. The oldest Egyptian tombs that contain wheat, 

 which, by the way, never germinates after its millennia of rest, 

 belong to the First Dynasty, and are about six thousand years 

 old. But there must have been a long history of wheat before 

 that. 



Now it is a very interesting fact that the almost certain 

 ancestor of the cultivated wheat is at present living on the arid 

 and rocky slopes of Mount Hermon. It is called Triticum her- 

 monis, and it is varying notably to-day, as it did long ago when 

 it gave rise to the emmer, which was cultivated in the Neolithic 

 Age and is the ancestor of all our ordinary wheats. We must 

 think of Neolithic man noticing the big seeds of this Hermon 

 grass, gathering some of the heads, breaking the brittle spikelet- 

 bearing axis in his fingers, knocking off the rough awns or bruis- 

 ing the spikelets in his hand till the glumes or chaff separated off 

 and could be blown away, chewing a mouthful of the seeds and 

 resolving to sow and sow again. 



That was the beginning of a long story, in the course of 

 which man took advantage of the numerous variations that 

 cropped up in this sporting stock and established one successful 

 race after another on his fields. Virgil refers in the "Georgics" 

 to the gathering of the largest and fullest ears of wheat in order 

 to get good seed for another sowing, but it was not till the first 

 quarter of the nineteenth century that the great step was taken, 

 by men like Patrick Sheriff of Haddington, of deliberately select- 

 ing individual ears of great excellence and segregating their 

 progeny from mingling with mediocre stock. This is the method 

 which has been followed with remarkable success in modern times. 



One of the factors that assisted the Allies in overcoming the 

 food crisis in the darkest period of the war was the virtue of Mar- 

 quis Wheat, a very prolific, early ripening, hard red spring wheat 



