1052 



Notices of Books. 



[Feb., 



NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



The Wheat Plant— (John Percival, M.A., F.L.S., Professor of 

 Agricultural Botany at University College, Reading : pp. 463 : 63s. net : 

 Duckworth & Co.). The agriculturist — student, farmer, scientist — has again 

 and again been heard to ask " What is the best book about Wheat? " He has 

 been referred to Kornicke in the German or Vilmorin in the French, but in 

 English, with a few inconspicuous exceptions, there has been no book to 

 recommend. This should not be regarded as an indication of ignorance on the 

 part of English-speaking agricultural botanists nor of inertia, but it is due 

 simply to the difficulty of collecting a vast mass of fact from an almost limit- 

 less field. The field is wide because the growing of wheat is a staple of 

 English farming, its preparation for food involves big industries, and the 

 scientific problems it presents have attracted research-workers from every 

 department of botany and chemistry. He who would write a book about 

 wheat, then, must cast his net wide and have it very fine or he will surely 

 miss something that one or another of a host of expectant readers would have 

 him deal with. Whatever may be felt about this book it will at any rate be 

 granted that Professor Percival has essayed to add something entirely new to 

 English agricultural literature. 



The book is in two sections, and throughout it is adorned — there is no 

 other word — with the beautiful drawings and photographs that are to be 

 expected from its author. 



Part I describes the anatomy, the structure of all the parts, of the wheat 

 plant. Every detail of leaf, stem, flower and grain is accurately portrayed, 

 from the sprouting of the seed in the soil to the time when the plant is ripe 

 and ready to harvest. The root-system, the part upon which so much depends 

 but to which farmer and botanist alike are apt to pay so little attention, is 

 fully treated. Further, what is rare in books upon cereals, there is an explana- 

 tion of the part which the roots play in lt lodging." "quality " or "strength" 

 of grain finds a place, but, as many will feel, an inadequate one. The miller 

 has strong views upon the "kind " of wheat he desires — what English farmer 

 does not know that his wheat makes less per quarter than the " strong " 

 wheats of America, and elsewhere ? — and the chemist has sought to describe in 

 his own language the kind of Mdieat that will make the large, well-risen 

 loaf. These things the author barely mentions, and perhaps the reason is 

 disclosed by a passage in the second part : "So-called 'strength' of grain is 

 important, but wheats of the highest quality in this respect invariably give 

 small yields, and the consumer or his agents rarely pay enough for the 

 superior quality to cover the loss clue to diminished yield. It usually pays the 

 producer to grow wheat of inferior milling quality, and this has been specifically 

 recognised and adopted as a sound policy by the most successful wheat 

 growers during the last two hundred years in this country." Time alone can 

 be the critic of this pronouncement, but science would be wanting if it 

 accepted fatalistically the dogma that high yield cannot be combined with a 

 quality at any rate considerably superior to that of most of the wheats grown 

 in England during the last two hundred years. Not a f ew, indeed, are con- 

 vinced that this has already been abundantly disproved. 



