March — The First Sower, 95 



great works that ancient tradition has handed down to 

 us, there is none more full of majesty than this. The 

 old man has sown crops that were harvested long ago, 

 and his fathers before him have done this also for un- 

 numbered generations. When the legions of Caesar 

 swept through the country in pursuit of the Helvetii, 

 there were great granaries in the hill-fortresses that the 

 Gauls had filled from their well-cultivated cornfields. 

 In what far Eastern land, I wonder, did the sower first 

 go forth to sow? And what keen-minded, far-seeing, 

 early discoverer, aided by no hint from Science, first con- 

 ceived the notion of cultivating those utterly unpromising 

 gramina which were shortly to become corn, and wheat, 

 and barley ? Nobody knows how long the human race 

 used the cereal grasses before the clever bakers found 

 out at last the art of making what we call a loaf of bread. 

 It was nearly six hundred years after the foundation of 

 Rome when the Roman bakers developed their art to a 

 degree before undreamed of, and produced what at that 

 time was a novelty and a luxury, but is to us a matter of 

 primary necessity. Before that they made bread indeed, 

 but of the sort that was eaten by the besieged Parisians, 

 with bits of straw and awns in it ; and soldiers on the 

 march carried a sack of ill-ground flour, that they mixed 

 with water when they came to a spring or stream. We 

 know nothing of the first discoverers, humanity's earliest 

 benefactors, but not the least among them were the 

 discoverers of the cereals. The author of ' Lothair ' did 

 well to remind us of what we forget so easily — the merits 

 of discoverers whose discoveries have been long familiar. 



