168 HOW TO GROW GOOD CORN. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 



THE WILD OAT AS THE ORIGIN OF THE CULTIVATED 

 VARIETIES. 



Crop oats, like wheat, have ever been considered as 

 a direct gift from Ceres, and few, indeed, amongst 

 scientific men were willing to believe that they were 

 derived from a wild and weed species. Still, the 

 farmer had long maintained that oats, when culti- 

 vated, often left behind them weed oats ; and in some 

 districts of Worcester, Gloucester, and "Warwick, we 

 have known men refuse to grow oats as a crop from 

 their fear of producing the terrible weed, which, 

 indeed, the wild oat is on all hands admitted to be. 



Now, although we by no means wish to advance 

 the theory of transmutation, and cannot believe that 

 by any plan barley can be converted into oats, or 

 oats into barley, we are yet confident that what has 

 been termed ennobling, or the producing of a culti- 

 vated plant from a wild one, is oftentimes compara- 

 tively easy, and in none more so than in the 

 production of crop oats from the wild species, 

 Avena fatua. 



Professor Lindley, in the article " Avena," in 

 Morton's Cyclopedia of Agriculture, suggests that 

 the cultivated oat " is a domesticated variety of some 

 wild species, and may be not improbably referred to 

 Avena strigosa, bristle-pointed oat;" but our experi- 

 ments would show that the Avena fatua is the form 



