THE KERNING OF THE WHEAT. 183 



attempt to kill them down by fair means or foul. The 

 more you uproot them or burn them or sift their seeds, 

 the more pertinacious are those which still survive ; for 

 by picking out the more conspicuous you only leave the 

 more insidious to spread arid multiply ; and by cutting 

 off the roots from the sicklier you only leave the stronger 

 to send up fresh suckers and runners from their wounded 

 stocks. Yet, in spite of hard competition, and all this 

 wealth of intermingled weed, the corn now looks far 

 better than one could reasonably have hoped a week or 

 two ago ; and the shocks have filled out bravely for the 

 most part under the late fine weather ; though there are 

 really many empty spikelets, I fear, on most of the heads 

 mere barren chaff, with no grain inside it. Even in 

 the field we have already cut there will be no certainty 

 as to the actual yield until we begin the regular autumn 

 threshing. 



The sample spikes that I have picked from beside the 

 path and roughly husked by rolling them between my 

 palms seem to promise a fairly large harvest in this 

 particular patch of corn-land. The grains are large and 

 full, and the number of fertile spikelets on each head is 

 pretty well up to the average. Few things are sweeter 

 than fresh wheat, chewed till it is reduced to the condi- 

 tion of gluten ; and 1 suppose it must have been some 

 such chance trial on the part of some early savage that 

 first suggested the notion of cultivating the wild goat- 

 grass which became the ancestor of all our modern" wheat. 

 A hungry hunter, no doubt, coining home unsuccessfully 

 from stalking the antelopes with his flint-tipped arrows, 

 rubbed between his dusky hands some of the grasses that 

 grew on the open plain around him, and extracted from 

 their chaffy scales a few insignificant but sweet little 

 seeds. The original parents of all our cereals were 



