194 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



in all essential structural points ; and by constant tillage 

 and selection it has again been made of late years to 

 develop rapidly into a form not unlike that of the 

 poorest and earliest cultivated wheats. Of course, it 

 cannot be expected that experiments, however skilful, 

 spread over a few years only, would succeed in producing 

 from the wild stock grains equal to those which have 

 been produced by countless generations of unconscious 

 or semi-conscious selection on the part of primaeval 

 tillers. Still, enough has been done to show that even a 

 short course of carefully directed tillage will transform 

 the Mediterranean goat-grass into a fair imitation of the 

 wheat grown by our earliest agricultural ancestors. 



How soon in the history of man the goat-grass began 

 to be deliberately sown in little plots of ground around 

 the huts of evolving savages we can now hardly guess ; 

 certainly there remain no existing traces of its use by 

 the very first race which inhabited Europe the palaeo- 

 lithic hunters who chased the mammoth and the woolly 

 rhinoceros among the jungles of Abbeville or by the 

 glacier-bound terraces of the Thames Valley. But when 

 man first reappears in northern Europe, after the great 

 ice-sheets once more cleared away from the face of the 

 land, we find him growing and using a rude form of 

 wheat from the earliest moment of his re-establishment 

 in the desolated plains. Among the pile-villages of the 

 Swiss lakes, which were inhabited by men of the newer 

 stone age, we find side by side with the polished 

 flint axes and the hand-made pottery of the period 

 several cereals raised by the lake-dwellers on the neigh- 

 bouring mainland. The charred seeds and water-logged 

 shocks disinterred from the ruins of the villages include 



