186 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



brought back to Europe in a comparatively perfect con- 

 dition by the short dark people who settled our continent 

 immediately after the termination of the glacial era. 

 While the ice-sheet still spread over the face of England, 

 as it now spreads over the face of Greenland, the ances- 

 tors of the neolithic people must have been slowly im- 

 proving the breed of wheat somewhere among the re- 

 cesses of the central Asian plateau ; arid by the time the 

 northern peninsulas and islands became once more habit- 

 able, they must have returned to the vacant lands, bring- 

 ing with them the seeds of their goat-grass, now ad- 

 vanced to the condition of the small lake- wheat. This 

 gulf has again been nearly bridged over for us by the 

 direct experiments conducted of late years in France and 

 at Cirencester. 



From the neolithic time forward, the improved seed 

 has continued to grow bigger and bigger, both in the size 

 of the shocks and in the girth of the individual grains, 

 until the present day. The original small lake-wheat, 

 indeed, lingered on in use in Switzerland and the north 

 down to the days of the Roman conquest ; but mean- 

 while, in Egypt and the south, still better varieties were 

 being gradually developed by careful selection ; and we 

 find both kinds side by side in some few instances ; thus 

 showing that both were grown together at the same time 

 by races in different stages of civilization. "With the in- 

 troduction of these better kinds by the Greek and Roman 

 colonists into Gaul and Britain, the old lake-wheat be- 

 came quite extinct. Indeed, in every case the cultivated 

 seeds and fruits which grew in neolithic garden plots 

 were much smaller than those of our own time ; whereas 

 the wild seeds and wild fruits found under the same cir<- 

 cumstances are just as large as their congeners of the 

 present day. In other words, while circumstances have 



