738 
THE PRINCIPLES OP BOTANY. 
terminated by three or four, and the poles by two or three 
points or awns — beards. 
“ M. Fabre has shown how readily these characters become 
modified by cultivation ; and wide as is the apparent differ- 
ence between JEgilops ovata and common wheat, he has 
practically proved their botanical identity ; for from the seeds 
of the JEgilops, first sown in 1838, carefully raised in a 
garden soil, and resown every year from tlie produce he 
had through successive transformations by the eighfh year 
(1846), obtained crops of real wheat, as good as the gene- 
rality of those cultivated in his neighbourhood.” 
Impressed with these views, we repeated these experiments 
on the Cotteswolds, and after some years, namely, from 1855 
to 1859 we obtained some very satisfactory results, which 
were much aided by the warm summer of the latter year. 
These experiments were rudely put an end to ; but they 
were sufficient to assure us that wheat is not a species of 
Triticum at all, but is really derived from AEgilops. The 
behaviour of the kind of wheat known as Talavera will often 
make evident that peculiar fragility of ear mentioned by Mr. 
Bentham, and which we found to be a characteristic of 
MSgilops, but which lessened by cultivation. This Talavera 
was grown by us this year, and a bit of it, not being harvested 
until over ripe, became exceedingly brittle. 
Of course the matter of the presence or absence of awns 
must be of a very uncertain character, and even in a bearded 
sample some ears will occur in which the awns are scarcely 
shown ; thus we have by us some April wheat whose awns 
are usually as long as those of barley, almost devoid of awn, 
and this year we grew some Essex white wheat, a variety 
remarkable for the absence of awns, with these appendages 
as much as three inches in length. 
These facts about wheat are not merely of curious interest, 
but they have a very important practical bearing. If we 
view the wheat plant as a derivative, we shall be at no loss 
in understanding how the vast number of varieties have been 
brought about — varieties applicable to a wide range of cli- 
matal conditions, and the ease with which new forms can be 
brought about by hybridization and selection is a ’matter of 
importance, because older varieties too often repeated are 
apt to degenerate, both in quality of grain and quantity of 
crop. 
But when we speak of acclimatizing wheat, we think it 
would be excessively difficult to make any existing form grow 
well in a climate not congenial to it, though it might be 
