CHAPTER X 



WILD SMALL SPELT 



Triticum aegilopoides, Bal. ex Korn. (aegilopodioides, sphalm.). Handb. 

 d. Getreideb. i. 109 (1885). 



Crithodium aegilopoides. Link in Linnaea, ix. 132 (1834). 

 Triticum boeoticum, Boiss. Diagn. ser. i. fasc. 13, p. 69 (1853). 

 Aegilops Crithodium, Steud. Syn. Gram. 355 (1855). 

 Triticum monococcum, fi. lasiorrachis , Boiss. Fl. Or. v. 673 (1884). 

 T. monococcum, A. aegilopoides, Asch. u. Graeb. Syn. ii. 701 (1901). 



THIS wild species of Triticum was first described under the name 

 Crithodium aegilopoides by Link, who found it in Greece between Nauplia 

 and Corinth in 1833. 



It is a widely distributed grass on the sides of low hills in Thessaly, 

 Boeotia, and Achaia in Greece, in South Bulgaria, and on loamy soils in 

 vineyards in Southern Serbia. Three varieties of it were discovered by 

 Larionow in 1909 near Balaklava in the Crimea, and the variety of T. 

 monococcum mentioned by Marschall Bieberstein (Fl. Tauro-caucas. 

 vol. i. p. 85) as occurring wild in the Crimea and Eastern Caucasus was 

 probably the same species. The species is also met with throughout 

 Asia Minor extending in Kurdistan to the western border of Persia. 



There is no doubt that it is from some of the varieties of this wild 

 species that the cultivated Small Spelt (Triticum monococcum, L.) has 

 been derived. 



GENERAL CHARACTERS OF T. aegilopoides, Bal. 



The coleoptile is usually purple, the shoots of the young plants in some 

 forms erect, in others prostrate. The culms are erect, solid or hollow 

 with thick walls, elastic and slender, from 40 to 160 cm. (15-60 inches) 

 high, smooth except at the nodes, which are covered with white deflexed 

 hairs ; the upper internode is exceptionally long, in some forms reaching 

 a length of 65 cm. in culms whose total length is not more than 100 cm. 



The blades of the young plants are narrow (3-6 mm. across), those of 



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