-j^/^^i:^ 
arities of the various regions of nature, or classes of 
phenomena, of which they treat ; but the English reader 
"W'ill, in some cases, perhaps, find traces of the peculiai" 
character which distinguishes what is considered the 
'* classic" style of German composition, and which often 
appears rather inflated to us. This is no fault of the 
translator, who has executed her pai-t admirably, since it 
does not He in mere idiomatic phrases, but in the gene- 
ral style; and it requires, therefore, that we should 
remember that the author "wi'ote the work for a German 
Xmblic, and consequently adopted the peculiarities of 
his national Hteratiu-e. 
The notes and Annotations are, to us, the most pleasing 
portion of the work, not only as being free from the pecu- 
liarities of style just alluded to, but as containing such a 
mass of information on such a variety of subjects. Each 
of them is a little sketch of a particular subject, giving 
all the information we at present possess on it ; so that 
we may take up the volumes at any spare moment, and 
find a short account of some interesting question, serv- 
ing at once either as a means of acquiring a certain 
amount of definite knowledge, or, by the references to 
authorities, as a guide in the prosecution of fiu'ther 
study. 
"With these remarks we will pass to some of the sub- 
jects which promise to be most attractive to ovir readers ; 
and of these we shall scarcely find one of greater inte- 
rest than the note on "the cultivation of farinaceous 
" The original habitat of the farinaceous grasses is "WTapped 
in the same obscurity as that of the domestic animals which 
have accompanied man since his earliest migrations. The 
German word for corn, " getreide," has been ingeniously 
derived, by Jacob Grimm, from the old Gei*man gitragida, getre- 
gede. 'It is, as it were, the tame fruit (fruges, frumontum) 
which has come into the hands of man ; as we speak of tame 
animals in opposition to wild ones.' — {Jacob Crrimm, Gcsck dcr 
dcuischcn Sprache, 1848, i., G2). It is certainly a very sticking 
phenomenon, to find on one side of our planet nations to whom 
flour or meal, from small-eared grasses [Hordeacefe and Ave- 
nacew), and the use of milk were completely unkno>\Ti, while 
the nations of almost all parts of the other hemisphere cultivate 
the ccrealia, and rear milk-yielding animals. The cultivation of 
different kinds of grasses may be said to afford a characteristic 
distinction between the two parts of the world. In the New 
Continent, from 52 dcg. north to -16 dcg. south latitude, we see 
only one species cultivated, viz., maize. In the Old Continent, 
on the other hand, we find everywhere, from the earliest times 
of history, the fruits of Ceres, wheat, barley, spelt or red wheat, 
and oats. That wheat grew wild in the Leontine fields, as well 
as in several other places in Sicily, was a belief entertained by 
ancient nations, and is mentioned by Diodorus SiciUus (Lib. v., 
pp. 199 & 232. Wessell). Ceres was found in the Alpine 
meadows of Enna, and Diodorus fables that " the inhabitants of 
the Atlantis were unacquainted ^ith the fruits of Ceres, because 
they had sei)arated from the rest of mankind before those fruits 
had been shown to mortals." Sprengel has collected several 
interesting passages, which led him to think it probable that 
the greater part of our European kinds of giaia were originally 
wild in the northern parts of Persia and India, namely, summer 
wheat in the country of the Musicanes, a prorince in Northern 
India [Strabo, xv., 1017) ; barley ("antiquissimumfiiimentum," 
as Pliny calls it, and wMch is also the only cereal with which 
the Guanches of the Canaries were acquainted), according to 
Moses of Chorene {Geogr, Annen. cd Jfliiston, 1736, p. 360), on 
the Araxes or Kur in Georgia, and, according to Marco Polo, in 
Balascham in Northern India {Ramusio,\o\ ii, 10); and spelt 
or red wheat near Hamadan. But these passages, as has been 
shown by my keen-sighted friend and teacher Link, in an in- 
w^- 
structive critical memoir {Abhatid de Berlin ATcad., 1816, p. 123), 
still leave much imcertainty. I also only regarded the existence 
of originally wild kinds of grain in Asia as extremely doubtful, 
and viewed such as might have been seen there as having 
become wild [JSssai sur la Geogr. des PlanteSj 1805, p. 28). 
Reinhold Forster, who, before his voyage with Captain Cook, 
made, by order of the Empress Catherine, an expedition into 
Southern Russia for pm-poses of natural history, reported that 
the two-stalked simimer barley (Hordeum distichon), grew wUd 
near the jimction of the Samara and the Volga. At the end of 
the month of September, 1829, Ehrenberg and myself on our 
journey from Orenburg and Uralsk to Suratow and the Caspian, 
also herborised on the banks of the Samara. "We were indeed 
struck with the quantity of wheat and rye plants growing in 
what might be called a wild state in the uncultivated gi'ound ; 
but the plants did not appear to us to differ from the ordinary 
cultivated ones. Ehi-enberg received from M. Carelin a kind of 
rye, (Secale fragile), gathered on the Kirgis steppe, and which 
MarschaU ^"on Biebierstein regarded for a time as the original or 
mother plant of om- cultivated rye (Secale cereale). Although 
Olivier and Michaux speak of spelt (Tritieum spclta) as glowing 
wild at Hamadan in Persia, Achille Richard does not consider 
that Michaux's hei'bariiim bears out this statement. Greater 
confidence is due to the most recent accounts obtained by the 
unwearied zeal of a highly-informed tra-s-eller. Professor Carl 
Koch. He found much rj-e (Secale cereale, var. h, pectinata), 
in the Pontic Moimtains, at elevations of upwards of five or six 
thousand feet, in places where within the memory of the inhabi- 
tants no grain of the kind had ever been cultivated. Koch re- 
marks, that the circumsttmce is 'the more important, because 
with us this gi-ain never propagates itself spontaneously.' In 
the Schii-wan parts of the Caucasus, Koch collected a kind of 
barley, which he calls 'Hordeimi spontaneum,' and considers it 
to be the origuially wild * Hordeum zeocriton' of Linnaeus ( Carl 
Koch Beitrage zitr Flora des Orients. Part i., pp. 139 & 142,)," 
We may add to this, that Prof. A. DecandoUe has, in 
a late number of the Bihliotheque Universelle of Geneva, 
expressed himself in favour of Prof. C. Koch's views, 
and considers that he has fully made out his case. 
The author adds, that wheat was first cultivated in 
New Spain by a negro slave of the great Cortes. He 
had found thi-ee grains of it amongst the rice which had 
been brought from Spain for the pro\asion of the army. 
The fii'st wheat sown at Quito was by a Franciscan 
monk, Fray Jodoco Risi, a native of Ghent. Himiboldt 
saw, in the Franciscan Convent at Quito, the earthen 
vessel which had contained the wheat, preserved as a 
relic, 
" The first sowing had been made in front of the convent, on 
what is now the Plazuela de San Francisco, after cutting down 
the forest which then extended from the foot of the volcano of 
Pichincha to the spot in question. The monks, whom I often 
visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain to them 
the inscription on the earthen vessel, wliich they thought must 
contain some mystic reference to the wheat. I read the motto, 
which was in the old German dialect, and was — " ^^^loso di'inks 
from me, let him not forget his God." I, too, felt with the 
monks, that this old German driiiking vessel was a ti'uly vene- 
rable relic. AVould that there had been preserved everywhere 
in the New Continent the names, not of those who made the 
earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who first in- 
trusted to it these its fnuts so early associated with the civili- 
zation of mankind in the Old Continent." 
In the second volume we meet with a brief notice of 
a scarcely loss important plant : — 
"My old friend, Colonel Acosta, in his instructive work on- 
titled Compendio de la Hist, de la Niieva Granada, p. 1S5, 
endeavours to prove, by means of the Chihcha language, that 
' potatoes (Solannm tuberosum) bear at Usm^ the native non- 
Peruvian name of Yomi ; and were foimd by Quesada ah'eady 
cidtivated in the province of Yelcz as early as 1537, a period 
when their inti'oduction from Chili, Peru, and Quito, would 
