The World's Commercial Products 



This, however, is not the case for the majority of the inhabitants of modern civilised 

 countries, who no longer live by direct tilling of the land. To supply their needs foodstuffs 

 must be grown, frequently either in part or wholly in other countries. Some idea of the 

 enormous development of the trade in foodstuffs may be gathered from the fact that the 

 annual value of wheat alone imported into the United Kingdom is about £35,000,000 sterling. 

 The most important amongst these foodstuffs are undoubtedly the cereals, namely, 

 wheat, barley, oats, rye, rice, Indian corn or maize, millets, sorghum or dhurra, and others 

 less widely used. More than one half the whole population of the world subsists to a great 

 extent on rice, and the vital importance of wheat needs no demonstration. 



The cereals are members of the great family of the grasses which have been cultivated 

 by man from time immemorial. Originally, no doubt, they were wild plants which attracted 

 attention owing to the comparatively large quantities of foodstuffs they yielded, the ease 

 with which they could be collected, and their edible qualities. Now, in the majority of cases, 

 the original wild forms are no longer known, and as is common with plants cultivated in many 

 lands and during long periods, innumerable species and varieties have been evolved as the 

 result of conscious and unconscious selection by man of the forms which appeared desirable 



for one or other of their qualities. Their 

 very name — cereals or cerealia — indicates 

 the great value attached to them in early 

 historic times. They are so named after 

 the goddess Ceres, as the Romans called 

 her — Demeter of the Greeks — the pat- 

 roness of agriculture and all the fruits of 

 the earth. In the temperate regions of 

 the world wheat is the principal cereal 

 grown, and there are many different 

 varieties suited to varying conditions. 

 As we go farther north, barley, oats, and 

 rye increase in importance, and although 

 they are grown for special purposes along 

 with wheat, it is important to note that 

 they will thrive in countries and under 

 conditions not suited to wheat. Starting 

 again from the temperate zones and 

 travelling north or south, as the case may be, we enter the warmer countries where wheat 

 cultivation is often associated with that of rice, maize, sorghum, etc. In the tropics, however, 

 wheat will not thrive at low elevations, but rice, maize, sorghum, and various millets form the 

 great cereal crops, their relative importance varying in different countries. 



Sometimes the use of the word " cereal " is extended to include buckwheat and other 

 starch-yielding plants, but these are not true cereals. There are also the important starch- 

 yielding plants such as the potato, yam, sweet potato (a kind of convolvulus), manioc or 

 cassava, etc. These all form underground tubers, and are regarded as vegetables, in 

 which section of this book they are discussed. Still another group of starch plants exists 

 yielding arrowroot of various kinds, sago, etc. These are treated in the section on starches 

 and meals. 



We will now turn to the consideration of the cereals and deal first with those of temperate 

 countries, and afterwards with those grown in the warmer regions of the world. Of the first 

 group by far the most important is wheat. Throughout the temperate regions of the world 

 are found a considerable number of grasses, either wild or cultivated, which are sufficiently 

 alike for botanists to group them together into a genus and to call them all by the old classical 

 name for wheat, namely, Triticum. Three of these wild forms occur in Great Britain, one of 



THE MOTOR IN AGRICULTURE 



