ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 173 



me to explain to them the inscription on the earthen 

 vessel, which they thought must contain some mystic refer- 

 ence to the wheat. I read the motto, which was in the 

 old German dialect, and was "Whoso drinks from me 

 let him not forget his God/ 7 I too felt with the monks 

 that this old German drinking vessel was a truly venera- 

 ble relic. Would that there had been preserved every 

 where in the New Continent the names, not of those who 

 made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those 

 who first intrusted to it these its fruits so early asso- 

 ciated with the civilisation of mankind in the Old Continent ! 

 In respect generally to the names of the kinds of grain, as 

 bearing on the original affinities of different languages, a 

 high authority has remarked, that " such indications are 

 much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain, and 

 on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with 

 the care of cattle : herdsmen when dispersed had still much 

 in common, whereas the subsequent cultivators of the soil 

 had to create new words. But the fact that in comparison 

 with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks appear nearly on a 

 par with the Germans and Slavonians, argues in favour of 

 the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two 

 latter. Yet the Indian " Java" (Frumentum hordeum), 

 compared with the Lithuanian tf jawai/' and the Finnish 

 "jywa," offers a singular exception." (Jac. Grimm, Gesch. 

 der deutschen Sprache, Th. i. S. 69.) 



( 28 ) p. 14. " Keeping by preference to the cooler 

 mountain region*? 



Throughout Mexico and Peru the traces of a great degree 



