172 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



cultivated rye, Secale cereale. Although Olivier and 

 Michaux speak of spelt (Triticum spelta) as growing wild at 

 Hamadan in Persia, Achill Bichard does not consider that 

 Michaux's herbarium bears out this statement. Greater 

 confidence is due to the most recent accounts obtained by 

 the unwearied zeal of a highly-informed traveller, Professor 

 Carl Koch. He found much rye (Secale cereale, var. p, 

 pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, at elevations of upwards 

 of five or six thousand feet, in places where within the 

 memory of the inhabitants no grain of the kind had ever 

 been cultivated. Koch remarks, that the circumstance is 

 " the more important because with us this grain never pro 

 pagates itself spontaneously." In the Schirwan parts of the 

 Caucasus, Koch collected a kind of barley which he calls 

 " Hordeum spontaneum," and considers to be the originally 

 wild " Hordeum zeocriton" of Linnaeus. (Carl Koch 

 Beitrage zur Mora des Orients, Heft i. S. 139 and 142.) 



A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who culti- 

 vated wheat in New Spain. He had found three grains of 

 it amongst the rice which had been brought from Spain for 

 provision for the army. In the Franciscan convent at 

 Quito, I saw preserved as a relic the earthen vessel which 

 had contained the first wheat sowed there by the Franciscan 

 monk Fray Jodoco Bixi, a native of Ghent in Flanders. 

 The first sowing had been made in front of the convent, 

 on what is now the Plazuela de San Francisco, after cut- 

 ting down the forest which then extended from the foot 

 of the volcano of Pichincha to the spot in question. The 

 monks, who I often visited during my stay at Quito, begged 



