PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 357 



(the modern Mazanderan) the grains of wheat which fell 

 from the ear sowed themselves. This may be observed 

 to some degree at the present day in all countries, and 

 the author says nothing upon the important question 

 whether this accidental sowing reproduced itself in the 

 same place from generation to generation. According to 

 the Odyssey} wheat grew in Sicily without the help of 

 man. But it is impossible to attach great importance to 

 the words of a poet, and of a poet whose very existence 

 is contested. Diodorus Siculus at the beginning of the 

 Christian era says the same thing, and deserves greater 

 confidence, since he is a Sicilian. Yet he may easily have 

 been mistaken as to the wild character, as wheat was 

 then generally cultivated in Sicily. Another passage in 

 Diodorus ^ mentions the tradition that Osiris found wheat 

 and barley growing promiscuously with other plants at 

 Nisa, and Dureau de la Malle has proved that this town 

 was in Palestine. Among all this evidence, that of Berosus 

 and that of Strabo for Slesopotamia and Western India 

 alone appear to me of any value. 



The five species of seed of the ceremony instituted 

 by Chin-nong are considered by Chinese scholars to be 

 natives of their country,^ and Bretschneider adds that com- 

 munication between China and Western Asia dates only 

 from the embassy of Chang-kien in the second century 

 before Christ. A more positive assertion is needed, how- 

 ever, before we can believe wheat to be indigenous in 

 China ; for a plant cultivated in western Asia two or three 

 thousand years before the epoch of Chin-nong, and of 

 which the seeds are so easily transported, may have been 

 introduced into the north of China by isolated and un- 

 known travellers, as the stones of peaches and apricots 

 were probably carried from China into Persia in pre- 

 historic time. 



Botanists have ascertained that wheat is not wild in 

 Sicily at the present day.* It sometimes escapes from 



' Lib. ix. V. 109. 



' Diodorns, Terasson's trans., ii. pp. 186, 190. 

 ' Bretschneider, ibid., p. 15. 



* Parlatore, Fl. Ital., i. pp. 46, 568. His assertion is the more 

 worthy of attention that he was a Sicilian. 



