804 DISCUSSION ON WHEAT: 
together ; Hackel even treats it as a distinct species. But in a posthumous 
paper just published Koerniclge recognises the Polish wheats as mutations 
from Hard wheats, characterised by the over-development of the outer or 
involucral glumes; various North African Hard wheats certainly support 
this view very strongly. Polish wheat is first mentioned in the seventeenth 
century ; although it may not have been known to the Greeks, it is probably 
of much earlier origin than is generally assumed, as it is represented in 
Abyssinia by several marked races. Outside of Africa its cultivation is 
confined nowadays to Italy and Spain. 
We have so far accounted for the two wild wheats, the Einkorn, the 
Emmer, the Hard, the English, and Polish wheats. Their relations and 
early history may be considered as fairly established. It is different with 
the Soft and the Dwarf wheats, which have this in common and 
in contradistinction from the Hard wheats, that the outer or involucral 
glumes are keeled only in the upper part but rounded below. The Soft 
wheats are extremely numerous and show perhaps a greater range of 
variation than the others. They occur in our day wherever wheat is grown, 
although they are not always the predominant race. They are believed to 
have formed the bulk of the ‘Ivpés’ of the ancient Greeks and of the 
Triticum of the Romans. Many finds in neolithic strata all over Europe 
have been assigned to them, so that the Soft wheats would appear to be as 
old as any. But there is this double difficulty, that the descriptions of the 
ancients are too vague to guide us, while the actual finds consist exclu- 
sively of loose grains, varying very much in size and shape. Buschmann 
enumerated not fewer than twenty-two places in Europe where prehistoric 
grains assigned to Triticum vulgare—that is, the Soft wheat group—had 
been discovered; of these more than one-half (thirteen) belong to the 
neolithic age. Considering, however, the difficulty of identifying loose 
grains of these wheats, particularly if not very well preserved, we have to 
be on our guard against hasty conclusions concerning the dates and the 
extent of their cultivation in those remote times; in any case, they do not 
offer us a clue to their descent. Structurally they are, no doubt, closely 
allied to the Hard wheats, but I doubt whether they have the same origin. 
Schweinfurth remarks that all the old Egyptian grains of this class which 
he saw were remarkably small. The same can be said of most of the 
neolithic grains of Central Europe, and of the two English prehistoric 
samples in the Kew Museum, while most of these grains are at the same 
time comparatively stout. These old small-grained races are probably nearer 
to the primitive form, but if so the latter has not yet been discovered. 
With respect to the Dwarf wheats we are in a similar position. 
Although at present nowhere extensively grown, to judge from their present 
and past distribution they must have once been grown over a much larger 
area. They are said to have been found in several neolithic localities in 
Central Europe; here again the finds, with two exceptions, consisted of 
grains only. These exceptions are some ears and spikelets from the Swiss 
lake dwellings, described by Heer as Triticum vulgare antiquorum, and 
some spikelets from the same localities referred by him to Triticum com- 
pactum. The latter resemble, according to Heer, the ordinary Dwarf wheat 
of modern Switzerland so much that he did not hesitate in identifying them 
with it. The other, however, his Triticum vulgare antiquorum, is quite 
distinct. The ears, although not intact, are splendidly preserved as far as 
they go. Their grains—usually three to four in each spikelet—are very 
small and stout. Other still more rounded grains from the neolithic and 
Bronze period of Central and South Europe have been described as Triticum 
compactum var. globiforme by Buschmann. Here again we have, as in 
the Soft wheats, an indication that the primitive form must have been, 
unlike T'riticwm dicoccoides, a small- atid probably stout-grained Triticunv 
