NOTES AND ABSTRACTS. 



269 



some to harvest, and prevents thrashing by flails, and which man set 

 himself first to overcome, until naked grains and a rigid rachis have 

 become the rule and cultivated wheat is incapable of perpetuating itself 

 without the intervention of man. Among cultivated wheats there are 

 still three which retain the brittle rachis, einkorn, emmer, and spelt. 

 Of these there seem sufficient botanical or historical reasons for 

 rejecting two — einkorn and spelt — as the progenitors of cultivated 

 wheats, while emmer is the species of grain of which we have the 

 oldest records. Durum wheat has been found in Egypt in some tombs 

 of the first dynasty, that is about B.C. 4000, but emmer, though it 

 has entirely given place to durum wheat in Egypt to-day, is found in 

 far greater abundance and in all the tombs. It has been found in the 

 lake dwellings of Wangen and Eobenhausen which date back to the 

 end of the neolithic epoch, and is thus the only species which has been 

 cultivated from the very beginning of civilization. We are therefore 

 justified in asserting it to be the progenitor of our cultivated wheat and 

 in considering it so desirable to find the emmer in its wild form. In 

 1873 Kornicke discovered among stems of Hordeum spontaneum 

 in the herbarium of the National Museum of Vienna, gathered on 

 Mount Hermon, part of an ear of a graminiferous plant which he 

 considered to be a wild wheat and which resembled the emmer. With 

 unaccountable forgetfulness he did not speak of this discovery in the 

 work on cereals he was then preparing, and it was only much later that 

 he reported it and vainly urged all botanists who went into the neigh- 

 bourhood of Mount Hermon, and the Academies of Vienna and Berlin 

 to turn their attention to this subject. In 1904, however, Mr. Aaron- 

 sohn was in Upper Galilee and made a special unsuccessful expedition 

 to Mount Hermon to search for this emmer which had definitely taken 

 the name of Tritrium dicoccum dicoccoides. In 1906 he again went to 

 Upper Galilee on the same errand and this time in the vineyard of 

 the Jewish Agricultural Colony at Eosh Pinar, at the foot of Jebel 

 Safed, he discovered the plant for which he was seeking in a crevice of 

 a rock of nummulitic limestone. Still other expeditions resulted in the 

 discovery of an astounding number of forms of T. dicoccum dicoccoides 

 not only in the neighbourhood of Mount Hermon but all over the 

 countries of Moab and Gilead. Mr, Aaronsohn also gathered a plant of 

 wild rye, Secale montanum, which had always hitherto been said not to 

 belong to the East at all. His researches further revealed the wide 

 range of T. dicoccum dicoccoides which is always found in company 

 with Hordeum spontaneum, and which apparently grows only in 

 crevices of rocks where there is only a thin layer of soil, in the most arid 

 situations and fully exposed to the sun. The only formation in which 

 it does not thrive seem to be the Senonian rocks and the Nari con- 

 glomerate. All the facts and details collected by the author seem to 

 him to prove conclusively that this Triticum was undoubtedly the pro- 

 totype of all cultivated wheats and that the cultivation of cereals must 

 have originated in Syria and Palestine, or in closely adjoining localities, 

 where in some parts the hills are sown so thick with emmer and wild 



