ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 171 



quissimum frumentum," as Pliny calls it, and which is also 

 the only cereal with which the Guanches of, the Canaries were 

 acquainted), according to Moses of Chorene (Geogr, Armen. 

 ed. Winston, 1736, p. 360), on the Araxes or Kur in 

 Georgia, and according to Marco Polo in Balascham in 

 Northern India (Ramusio, vol. ii. p. 10) ; and spelt or red 

 wheat, near Hamadan. But these passages, as has been 

 shewn by my keen-sighted friend and teacher Link, in an 

 instructive critical memoir (Abhandl. de Berl. Akad. 

 1816, S. 123), still leave much uncertainty. I also 

 early regarded the existence of originally wild kinds of grain 

 in Asia as extremely doubtful, and viewed such as might 

 have been seen there as haying become mild. (Essai sur la 

 Geographic des Plantes, 1805, p. 28.) Eeinhold Porster, 

 who before his voyage with Captain Cook, made by order of 

 the Empress Catherine an expedition into Southern Russia 

 for purposes of natural history, reported that the two- 

 stalked summer barley (Hordeum distichon), grew wild near 

 the junction of the Samara and the Yolga. At the end of 

 the month of September, 1829, Ehrenberg and myself, on 

 our journey from Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the 

 Caspian, also herborised on the banks of the Samara. We 

 were, indeed, struck with the quantity of wheat and rye 

 plants growing in what might be called a wild state in the 

 uncultivated ground, but the plants did not appear to us to 

 differ from the ordinary cultivated ones. Ehrenberg received 

 from M. Carelin a kind of rye, Secale fragile, gathered on 

 the Kirgis Steppe, and which Marschall von Bieberstein 

 regarded for a time as the original or mother plant of our 



