Note 27 — STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 14.—“The cultivation of farinaceous grasses.”

The original habitat of the farinaceous grasses is wrapped in the same obscurity as that of the domestic animals which have accompanied man since his earliest migrations. The German word for corn, “Getraide,” has been ingeniously derived by Jacob Grimm from the old German gitragidi, getregede. “It is as it were the tame fruit (fruges, frumentum), which has come into the hands of man; as we speak of tame animals in opposition to wild ones.” (Jacob Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, 1848, Th. i. S. 62.) It is certainly a very striking phenomenon, to find on one side of our planet nations to whom flour or meal from small-eared grasses (Hordeaceæ and Avenaceæ), and the use of milk, were completely unknown, while the nations of almost all parts of the other hemisphere cultivate the Cerealia, 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° north to 46° south latitude, we see only one species cultivated, viz. maize. In the Old Continent, on the other hand, we find every where, 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 Siculus. (Lib. v. p. 199 and 232, Wessel.) Ceres was found in the alpine meadow of Enna; and Diodorus fables that “the inhabitants of the Atlantis were unacquainted with the fruits of Ceres, because they had separated from the rest of mankind before those fruits had been shewn to mortals.” Sprengel has collected several interesting passages which lead him to think it probable that the greater part of our European kinds of grain were originally wild in the northern parts of Persia and India, namely, summer wheat in the country of the Musicanes, a province in Northern India (Strabo, xv. 1017); barley (“antiquissimum frumentum,” as Pliny calls it, and which is also the only cereal with which the Guanches of the Canaries were acquainted), according to Moses of Chorene (Geogr, Armen. ed. Whiston, 1736, p. 360), on the Araxes or Kur in Georgia, and according to Marco Polo in Balascham in Northern India (Ramusio, vol. ii. p. 10); and spelt or red wheat, near Hamadan. But these passages, as has been shewn by my keen-sighted friend and teacher Link, in an instructive critical memoir (Abhandl. de Berl. Akad. 1816, S. 123), still leave much uncertainty. I also early 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. (Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes, 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 purposes of natural history, reported that the two-stalked summer barley (Hordeum distichon), grew wild near the junction 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 Saratow 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 ground, but the plants did not appear to us to differ from the ordinary cultivated ones. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin a kind of rye, Secale fragile, gathered on the Kirgis Steppe, and which Marschall von Bieberstein regarded for a time as the original or mother plant of our cultivated rye, Secale cereale. Although Olivier and Michaux speak of spelt (Triticum spelta) as growing wild at Hamadan in Persia, Achill Richard does not consider that Michaux’s herbarium bears out this statement. Greater confidence is due to the most recent accounts obtained by the unwearied zeal of a highly-informed traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found much rye (Secale cereale, var. β pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, at elevations of upwards of five or six thousand feet, in places where within the memory of the inhabitants no grain of the kind had ever been cultivated. Koch remarks, that the circumstance is “the more important because with us this grain never propagates itself spontaneously.” In the Schirwan parts of the Caucasus, Koch collected a kind of barley which he calls “Hordeum spontaneum,” and considers to be the originally wild “Hordeum zeocriton” of Linnæus. (Carl Koch Beiträge zur Flora des Orients, Heft i. S. 139 and 142.)

A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated wheat in New Spain. He had found three grains of it amongst the rice which had been brought from Spain for provision for the army. In the Franciscan convent at Quito, I saw preserved as a relic the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sowed there by the Franciscan monk Fray Jodoco Rixi, a native of Ghent in Flanders. 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, who I often visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain to them the inscription on the earthen vessel, which they thought must contain some mystic reference to the wheat. I read the motto, which was in the old German dialect, and was—“Whoso drinks from me let him not forget his God.” I too felt with the monks that this old German drinking vessel was a truly venerable relic. Would that there had been preserved every where in the New Continent the names, not of those who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who first intrusted to it these its fruits so early associated with the civilisation of mankind in the Old Continent! In respect generally to the names of the kinds of grain, as bearing on the original affinities of different languages, a high authority has remarked, that “such indications are much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain, and on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with the care of cattle: herdsmen when dispersed had still much in common, whereas the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to create new words. But the fact that in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks appear nearly on a par with the Germans and Slavonians, argues in favour of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet the Indian “java” (Frumentum hordeum), compared with the Lithuanian “jawai,” and the Finnish “jywa,” offers a singular exception.” (Jac. Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, Th. i. S. 69.)