134 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



its ancestors first diverged from the common stock of 

 the lilies and the water-plantains, to the time when 

 savage man found it growing wild among the untilled 

 plains of prehistoric Asia, and took it under his special 

 protection in the little garden plots 

 around his wattled hut, whence it has 

 gradually altered under his constant 

 selection into the golden grain that now 

 covers half the lowland tilth of Europe 

 and America. There is no page in 

 botanical history more full of genuine 

 romance than this ; and there is no 

 page in which the evidence is clearer or . 

 more convincing for those who will take 

 the easy trouble to read it aright. 



Moreover, the case of wheat is a 

 very interesting one, after the case of 

 the daisy and of cleavers, because it 

 exhibits a different order of evolution, 

 that namely of continuous degradation. 

 Whi'e the daisy has gone constantly up, 

 and while the goose-grass has fallen but a little after 

 a long course of upward development, the grasses 

 generally have from the very first exhibited a con- 

 stant and unbroken structural decline. 



The fixed point from which we start on our 



Fig. 30. 



Head of Wheat. 



