THE KERNING OF THE WHEAT. 193 



which became the ancestor of all our modern wheat. A 

 hungry hunter, no doubt, coming home unsuccessfully 

 from stalking the antelopes with his flint-tipped arrows, 

 rubbed between his dusky hands some of the grasses 

 that grew on the open plain around him, and extracted 

 from their chaffy scales a few insignificant but sweet 

 little seeds. The original parents of all our cereals were 

 grasses of one kind or other, often belonging to remotely 

 different groups, but almost all indigenous inhabitants 

 of the Central Asian and Mediterranean regions. The 

 millets of India have been developed from wild species 

 closely resembling certain rare English grasses found 

 only in the southern counties ; the wild barleys grow 

 abundantly in many parts of Britain ; and the wild oat, 

 which flourishes in every district of England, is certainly 

 the ancestor of our cultivated oats. But the pedigree of 

 wheat, the most important of all our cereals, is a little 

 more obscure : it has varied to a greater degree from its 

 humble original than any other known artificial plant. 

 Fortunately, we are still able to recover the steps by 

 which it has been developed from what might at first 

 sight appear to be a very unlikely and ill-endowed 

 ancestor indeed. 



The English couch-grass which often proves such 

 a troublesome weed in our own country is represented 

 around the Mediterranean shores by an allied genus of 

 annual plants known as goat-grass ; and one of these 

 weedy goat-grasses has now been shown with great pro- 

 bability to be the wild form of our cultivated wheat. It 

 is a small dwarfish grass, with very petty seeds, and not 

 nearly so full a spike as the cereals of agriculture ; but 

 it was long ago remarked as closely allied to true wheat, 



O 



