THE "WILD WHEAT OF PALESTINE 287 



the wild wheat. In 1904, therefore, Aaronsohn visited 

 the foot of Mount Hermon and began his search. How- 

 ever, he had but little hope of success, for two other 

 botanists, Post and Bommiiller, had previously botanized 

 in the neighborhood of Rasheyya, the locality on Mount 

 Hermon where Kotschy's original specimen was sup- 

 posed to have been gathered, and yet in their two Floras 

 of Syria and Palestine they had failed to report finding 

 any species of Triticum. Aaronsohn, therefore, did not 

 long persist in his search and concluded that there had 

 been some mistake in the record of the locality from 

 which Kotschy's wild wheat had come. 



In 1905, Aaronsohn was again in Berlin and was 

 urged by the botanists there to renew his search. Stim- 

 ulated anew, he returned to Palestine, and in Jime, 1906, 

 took a long trip to Upper Galilee with the intention of 

 going as far as Mount Hermon and of spending as much 

 time as possible in looking fox the wild wheat. This 

 time his effort was crowned with success and even sooner 

 than he had anticipated. Whilst on the way to Mount 

 Hermon, he had the good fortune to rediscover the species 

 for which he had sought and thus to bring to light one of 

 the most interesting plants in the world. His own ac- 

 count of the event, which is contained in a Bulletin of the 

 United States Department of Agriculture, will now be 

 quoted : 



" On June 18, I was walking with my friend, the 

 agronomist Mr. M. Bermaim, in the vineyard of the Jew- 

 ish Agricultural Colony at Rosh Pinar, at the foot of 

 Jebel Safed, and was trying to demonstrate to him the 

 Eocene origin of the ground. Suddenly I noticed in a 

 crevice of a rock of nummulitie limestone an isolated 

 plant which at first sight looked like a stool of barley, but 

 which on closer inspection proved to be a wheat, the ripe 



