78 Plant-life of the Oxford District 



bullock, sheep, and pig, runs parallel with that of wheat, beans, turnips and 

 mangel. The ideal of the cultivator is to get one paying crop per season of 

 one variety of one plant ; since every additional type adds enormously to the 

 biological complex of the farm, requiring special methods for dealing with it, 

 and increases the intellectual pressure on the cultivator. It is owing to this 

 very fact that the ecology of the agricultural crop becomes wearisome to 

 the outsider ; and in walking through a field of corn or mangel, one is 

 inevitably attracted by the intrusive weeds rather than by the crop ; because 

 the former by contrast afford the greater variety, may possess a certain 

 aesthetic value, and are admittedly on their own. 



On the other hand, it must be remembered that crops are grown as 

 food for the human race or for cattle, that there is no other way of getting 

 food to keep the race going, and that advancing civilization has been based 

 on the efficiency of its food-material. 



The first cereal food of the human race was undoubtedly the grass Oryza 

 (Rice), easily puddled in a tropical swamp with no agricultural implements, and 

 giving a crop in the dry season of hard grain, capable of indefinite storage and 

 transport with little damage, to be readily converted into good food by the use 

 of a little boiling water. 



These factors imply a human society living in a tropical climate with 

 marked wet and dry seasons, as also a knowledge of fire and pottery. From 

 a race of arboreal fruit-eating organism, human beings thus became j^^-eating ; 

 the greater efficiency following the utilization of the food-reserves of the plant- 

 embryo itself, rather than the mere excess deposited in the fruit-wall and 

 devoted to purposes of ' animal-dispersal '. 



From such swamps, characteristic more particularly of the alluvial flats of 

 large continental rivers of the old world land-mass, similar civilizations followed 

 around the coast-line, as migrants in dug-out canoes seeking estuaries of other 

 rivers, and so founding the civilizations of the older world. A western Sumerian 

 migration, probably from the Indus-delta, colonized the delta of the Euphrates, 

 and being isolated by deserts, further advance took in the grasses of the sandy 

 hinterland, also capable of being cultivated by the rudest plough as a sharpened 

 stake. From such grasses, Wheat and Barley have more particularly developed 

 as the main food-supply of Western Europe, as civilization spread to Egypt and 

 along the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean to Greece and Rome, and from 

 Tyre to Carthage, to become the dominant food-grains of the dominant races 

 of the present world; as the food-value of the Wheat-grain gives greater 

 efficiency than that of Rice. 



The English, in turn, came as immigrants to Great Britain seeking corn- 

 land, and the parts of the country too hilly or too stony for the ready cultivation 

 of Wheat, remain to the present day as the * Celtic Fringe '. The colonization of 

 the prairie lands of Canada in the nineteenth century follows the same succession. 

 The cultivation of the Wheat-plant is not only the essential basis of 

 modern Western civilization, but it is the foundation of all English agricul- 

 tural practice. Wheat is still the key-crop of arable land, as arable land 

 implies cultivation by the plough, and the plough was invented for the tillage 

 of Wheat in sandy soil, though now specialized for plants grown in stiff clay. 

 Wheat, Triticum sativum^ comprises many much-modified mutants and 

 hybrids to the number of several hundred, 1 of a short-season xerophytic and 

 highly specialized grass of the Assyrian hinterland, in cultivation for probably 

 many thousands of years. The prototype, if not actually the Triticum Hermonis 

 of Aaronsohn, still growing wild in Palestine, would be so far similar that the 

 latter may be taken as affording the clue to its special biology, as a plant of 

 sub-desert environment and dispersal. That is to say, it requires a dry hot 

 season for seed-maturation, but sufficient water-supply in the soil during the 

 vegetative growing period. 



1 Percival, loc. cit., p. 518. 



