Wittmack — Our Present Knowledge of Ancient Plants. 11 
IV. FRUITS. 
Figs, olives, almonds, dates, chestnuts, walnuts, hazel- 
nuts, and some preserved fruits, which, perhaps, are cherries 
and grapes. 
V. ROOTS. 
Onions and leek. 
Nearly all these objects are carbonized and black, only the 
millet is grayish-yellow. The single peach-stone is also not 
carbonized, it looks nearly like a fresh peach-stone and per- 
haps is an accidental find. I may say that almonds and 
peaches were introduced into Italy scarcely 100 years before 
Christ. 
As to the Cereals, Pompeiian barley does not offer much in- 
terest. It appears to be like the Egyptian, the small barley, 
Hordeum hexastichum or tetrastichum (H. vulgare). The 
wheat isthe common wheat, T7'riticum vulgare, at least, I could 
not find with certainty the hardy wheat, Triticum durum, 
which is now so often cultivated in Southern Italy because it 
gives the best Macaroni and Spaghetti. Did the ancient 
Romans eat Macaroni and Spaghetti? Probably not. At 
least, Prof. Richard Engelmann, a famous archaeologist of 
Berlin, told me that not a word is mentioned in any of the 
ancient scriptures about them. The Ancients had only 
Polenta, a kind of grits (like our oatmeal) which they made 
of wheat or barley. 
Although there was in ancient Italy a great division of 
labor in other professions, it was not so with milling and 
baking. The baker groundthe grain himself and so we find the 
mills together with the ovens. The mills have a very peculiar 
shape. They look like an hour-glass of stone. The upper 
part of the hour-glass forms the funnel (or millhopper), the 
lower part rests on a conical projection of the bottom stone. 
By revolving the hour-glass around the cone the grain is 
ground. There are also other simple mills consisting only of 
a hollowed stone in which the grain is coarsely ground with 
another smaller stone or with a pestle, like in a mortar. 
