History of Wheat. 



7$ 



European as the primitive form. The only obvious change it has 

 undergone in the process of domestication is in the great reduction 

 or almost complete suppression of the hairs of the spindle, which 

 in the wild form are long, white, and altogether conspicuous. I 

 may at once remark that the same applies more or less to most 

 of the domesticated wheats, and it may be that this character also 

 enters in the correlation-plexus, which is connected with the dis- 

 semination of the wild wheats, and which I mentioned before. 

 Einkorn is, no doubt, one of the oldest wheats. Schliemann found 

 its grains in considerable quantity in the ruins of Troy, in the 

 so-called second town, which is approximately dated at 2000 b.c, ; 

 it has also been found in neolithic strata in Hungary and Switzer- 

 land. The ancient Greeks knew it as Tfyr) and 'AttX^ Zca ; but 

 the Romans do not seem to have cultivated it, except in Upper 

 Italy, and if the Spaniards received it early, as seems to be the 

 case, it must have been by way of Gaul. It is still a common 

 cereal with them ; otherwise it is grown in France, Switzerland, 

 Wurtemberg, Thuringia, and in some parts of the Balkan Penin- 

 sula. It does not seem to have spread eastward from its original 

 home. 



The only other wild wheat is Triticum dicoccoides. So much 

 turns on the discovery of this species that a short account of it 

 is necessary. In 1855 Theodor Kotschy collected a specimen of 

 Triticum on Mount Hermon, in Syria. It evidently did not strike 

 him as remarkable, as he does not mention it in his description 

 of the flora of that mountain ; nor was it noticed by any other 

 botanist until in 1889 the late Professor Koernicke announced at a 

 meeting of the Niederrheinische Gesellschaft at Bonn that he had 

 found the primitive or wild state of his Triticum vidgare (which 

 includes all the wheats with the exception of the Einkorn) in 

 Kotschy 's plant from Mount Hermon. This he named Triticum 

 vulgare var. dicoccoides. Nothing beyond a bare note stating 

 this announcement was published at the time. But when, a few 

 years ago, Professors Ascherson, Schweinfurth, and Warburg 

 made arrangements with a young Palestine farmer and botanist, 

 Mr. Aaronsohn, for the agricultural exploration of his country, 

 they also called his attention to Kotschy 's Triticum. In June, 

 1906, we find Aaronsohn travelling from Lake Tiberias to Mount 

 Hermon in search of the wheat. On the 12th of that month he 

 discovered the first colony of it a few miles to the north-west of 

 the site of ancient Capernaum, on Lake Tiberias. It was growing 

 in scattered tufts, associated with Echinops, Ononis, Prosopis, 

 &c, and nearly always with Hordeum spontaneum, the wild barley. 

 Crossing the Jordan and travelling towards Mount Hermon, he 

 again came across it near Arny, on the southern end of the 

 mountain, and then in many localities on the eastern slopes (if 



