802 DISCUSSION ON WHEAT: 
country, they also called his attention to Kotschy’s Z'riticum. In June 
1906 we find Aaronsohn travelling from Lake Tiberias to Mount Hermon in 
search of the wheat. On the 12th of that month he discovered the first 
cclony of it a few miles to the north-west of the site of ancient Capernaum, on 
Lake Tiberias. It was growing in scattered tufts, associated with Echinops, 
Ononis, Prosopis, &c., and nearly always with Hordewm spontaneum, the 
wild barley. Crossing the Jordan and travelling towards Mount Hermon 
he again came across it near Arny, on the southern end of the mountain, 
and then in many localities on the eastern slopes of Mount Hermon, in 
places ascending to over 2,000 m.; also on the northern slopes above 
Rascheia, where Kotschy found it fifty years previously, and from there east- 
wards to where the plateau extending towards Damascus begins. Here on 
Mount Hermon it was frequently associated with Triticum agilopioides, and 
near Rahle both species formed complete fields, with Triticum dicoccoides as 
the predominant partner. Last year Aaronsohn discovered T'riticum dicoc- 
coides in the country of Gilead, east of Jericho, growing under conditions 
similar to those in the Hermon district. One feature of Aaronsohn’s 
specimens is their want of homogeneity. This was already observed by the 
late Professor Koernicke, who, in a letter to Professor Schweinfurth written 
shortly before his death, said that the diversity of forms in Aaronsohn’s 
material of Triticum dicoccoides was quite bewildering. This will have to 
be taken into account in estimating the bearing of Aaronsohn’s specimens 
on the question of the origin of wheat, particularly when the results of the 
Poppelsdorf experimental series come to be worked out. Aaronsohn not 
only observed “'riticwm dicoccoides growing in intimate association with 
Triticum cegilopioides, but it seems (in one locality) also in the neighbour- 
hood of wheat-fields. The latter is not quite clear, but it is of the greatest 
importance to be certain about it, as the introduction of hybrids of Triticum 
dicoccoides and T'riticum durwm into the Poppelsdorf experiments might 
considerably affect their validity. 
On comparing the specimens of T’riticum dicoccoides, which I have seen 
myself, with our cultivated wheats, I was at once struck by the great 
resemblance of a glabrous form to a Hard wheat in the Kew collections from 
Urumiah in Persian Kurdistan. There was, no doubt, the differential 
correlation-plexus which separates the wheats proper from the Spelt wheats, 
and there was also the roundish cross-section of the grains of the Urumiah 
wheat against the triangular one of the grains of V'riticum dicoccoides, a 
character very likely correlated with the respective looseness and tightness 
of the grains in the husks. But apart from that and the somewhat longer 
and considerably rougher awns in the dicoccoides specimen, the resemblance, 
not so much of the whole spike but of some of the detached spikelets, 
amounted almost to identity. Even the villosity of the spindle edges was 
only slightly less pronounced in the Urumiah wheat than in the wild state. 
Unless we have here, in the glabrous dicoccoides specimen, a cross of 
Triticum dicoccoides with Lrviticwm dwrum (in which case, however, neither 
the fragility of the spindle nor the tightness of the grain in the husks nor 
the shape and anatomical structure were affected), the conclusion seems 
irresistible that this Z'riticwm dicoccoides is indeed the primitive form of 
the Hard wheats. Most of the other specimens of T'riticum dicoccoides 
which I could examine corresponded to the coarser, pubescent, dark, and 
black-awned races of Hard wheats, such as ‘africanum,’ ‘ niloticum,’ or 
‘libycum,’ although in some cases the approach was not so strikingly close. 
But if T'riticwm dicoccoides gave rise to the Hard wheats, it also gave rise 
to the Emmers, only that in the Emmers the spindle remained brittle, the 
grains tight in the husks, and the grain shell thin, while the spindle hairs 
were much reduced or all but disappeared, so that the Emmers represent an 
evolution parallel to that of the Kinkorn. The common origin of the Hard 
a 
