THE KERKING OF THE WHEAT. 185 



Still, enough has been done to show that even a short 

 course of carefully directed tillage will transform the 

 Mediterranean goat-grass into a fair imitation of the 

 wheat grown by our earliest agricultural ancestors. 



How soon in the history of man the goat-grass began 

 to be deliberately sown in little plots of ground around 

 the huts of evolving savages we can now hardly guess ; 

 certainly there remain no existing traces of its use by the 

 very first race which inhabited Europe the palaeolithic 

 hunters who chased the mammoth and the woolly rhinoc- 

 eros among the jungles of Abbeville or by the glacier- 

 bound terraces of the Thames Valley. But when man 

 first reappears in northern Europe, after the great ice- 

 sheets once more cleared away from the face of the land, 

 we find him growing and using a rude form of wheat 

 from the earliest moment of his re-establishment in the 

 desolated plains. Among the pile-villages of the Swiss 

 lakes, which were inhabited by men of the newer stone 

 age, we find side by side with the polished flint axes and 

 the hand-made pottery of the period several cereals raised 

 by the lake-dwellers on the neighboring mainland. 

 The charred seeds and water-logged shocks disinterred 

 from the ruins of the villages include millet, barley, and 

 several other grains ; but by far the commonest among 

 them is a peculiar small form of wheat, which has been 

 named scientifically after the ancient folk by whom it was 

 used. 



This lake-wheat, however, though it dates back to the 

 very beginning of the recent period in Europe, cannot 

 be considered as the first variety developed from the 

 primitive goat-grass by the earliest cultivators ; it is so 

 superior in character to the wild stock that it must 

 already have undergone a long course of tillage and selec- 

 tion in more genial climates, and must have been 



