( 334 ) 
XXIV.— 0/i the St. John's-Daij Rye. By W. P. Taunton, 
Barrister-at-LaNV. 
Prize Essay. 
Rye, called bv Linnaeus and the Latins, Secale ; by the Italians, 
Secala;by the French, Seigle ; by the Poles, Sieczka; names 
derived from the Celtic name Segal (Ainsworth) ; by the 
Germans, Schwarzer Rocken, is a plant of the order Tnandria 
Digynia of Linnaeus, and of the 2nd Class, Monocotyledoneae, or 
Endogenae, Order 210, Gramineae, Section 8th, Triticeae, of 
Jussieu. It is supposed by the authors of the ' Encyclopaedia 
Metropolitana,' who do not, however, assign either reason or 
authority for their position, to have been a native of Crete. 
Loudon (' Hort. Britann.,' voce Secale) ascribes its origin to the 
Crimea. But it would be presumptuous at this day to assert 
that we know the native country of this or of any other of the 
Cereal Grasses. Its habits are those of a plant inured to the 
coldest regions ; and we have the high authority of the President 
of the British Association for 1846, that Professor Von Midden- 
dorf (to whose works I have not as yet been able to obtain access) 
found crops of rye, more abundant than in his native Livonia, 
growing beyond the Yakutsk, on the surface of a frozen subsoil. 
This fact, and the concurrence of the earliest accounts which I 
have been able to trace, afford evidence that rye probably was 
introduced to Southern Europe from some northerly part of 
Asiatic Tartary. Although Moses speaks of a grain as being 
cultivated in Egypt 1491 years before the Christian era, which 
our translators of the Holy Bible have rendered by the name of 
rye (E.sod. ix. 32) ; and although the prophet Isaiah, also, 
chap, xxviii. ver. 25, speaks of a plant which our translators have 
rendered rye, as being cultivated in Judcn, yet I shall give some 
reasons below for believing that neither of these was the plant 
which we now know under the name of rye. 
Rye does not appear to be mentioned by Aristotle, who most 
likely would have known it, had it been in his day cultivated in 
Crete. Dioscorides, as I shall endeavour to prove below, was 
unacquainted with rye. Neither Cato, Virgil, Columella, nor 
Varro speak of rye, whence we may infer that it was not among 
the crops usually cultivated in Italy in the times of those writers. 
Pliny, however, in his 18th book, chapter xl., ed. P. Harduin, 
p. 119, says, that in his time the Taurini, who were a nation of 
Cisalpine Gaul, residing at the foot of the Alps, in the country 
now called Piedmont, cultivated Secale. Rye; and he adds the 
very remarkable fact that they called it Asia. When we recollect 
that these Taurini, or Taurisci, as Polybius calls them, are 
acknowledged by Slrabo, lib. iv. p. 286, line 16, to be of the 
Liguriaii race, who were carried down ihe valley of the Danube 
