16 i HOW TO GROW GOOD CORN. 



from experiment : this we now have, and upon it we 

 quote the following from Mr. Bentham, in the 

 Cyclopaedia of Agriculture, article "Triticum" : — 



It has never been contended that their original types have become 

 extinct, and various, therefore, have been the conjectures as to the 

 transformations they may have successively undergone ; and as no 

 accidental returns towards primitive forms have been observed, we 

 have till lately had but little to guide us in these vague surmises. 

 "Within the last few years, however, the experiments and observations 

 of M. Esprit Fabre, of Agde, in the south of France, seem to prove 

 a fact which had been more than once suggested; but almost always 

 scouted, that our agricultural wheats are cultivated varieties of a set 

 of grasses common in the south of Europe, which botanists have 

 uniformly regarded as belonging to a different genus, named jEgilops. 

 The principal character by which the latter genus had been dis- 

 tinguished, consisted in the greater fragility of the ear, and in the 

 glumes (i.e. the chaff-scales) being generally terminated by three or 

 four, and the pales by two or three points or awns (beards). But 

 M. Fabre has shown how readily these characters become modified 

 by cultivation ; and, wide as is the apparent difference between 

 jEgilops ovata and common wheat, he has practically proved their 

 botanical identity ; for, from the seeds of the JEgilops first sown in 

 1838, carefully raised in a garden soil, and re-sown every year from 

 their produce, he had, through successive transformations, by the 

 eighth year (1846) obtained crops of real wheat as good as the 

 generality of those cultivated in his neighbourhood. 



It was the description of the experiments of M. 

 Eabre, in the Journal of the Agricultural Society, 

 which led us to institute independent inquiries, to 

 which end, having purchased some seeds of JEgilops 

 ovata, we sowed them in our experimental garden 

 at Cirencester, in a prepared plot of five yards square, 

 on a subsoil of forest marble. Prom this seeds 

 were selected to carry on the experiments, whilst 

 the mass of the plants in the plot were allowed to 

 seed and come up spontaneously, which it did year 



