WHENCE WHEAT CAME

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 2, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 34.

WHENCE WHEAT CAME.

CLASSIC ACCOUNTS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRECIOUS CEREAL.

WHEAT, which is now the bread corn of twelve European nations, and is fast supplanting maize in America and several inferior grains in India, was no doubt widely grown in the prehistoric world. The Chinese cultivated it 2700 B. C. as a gift direct from Heaven; the Egyptians attributed its origin to Isis, and the Greeks to Ceres. Ancient monuments show that the cultivation of wheat had been established in Egypt before the invasion of the shepherds, and there is evidence that more productive varieties of wheat have taken the place of one, at least, of the ancient sorts. Innumerable varieties exist of common wheat. Colonel Le Conteur, of Jersey, cultivated 150 varieties. Mr. Darwin mentions a French gentleman who had collected 322 varieties, and the great firm of French seed merchants, Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie, cultivate about twice as many in their trial grounds near Paris. In their recent work on "Les Meilleurs Bles," M. Henry L. de Vilmorin has described 68 varieties of best wheat, which he has classed into seven groups, though these groups can hardly be called distinct species. M. Henry L. de Vilmorin has cross-bred three of them, Triticum vulgare, Triticum turgidum, and Triticum durum, and has found the offspring fertile. Three small-grained varieties of common wheat were cultivated by the first lake dwellers of Switzerland (time of Trojan war), as well as by the less ancient lake dwellers of Western Switzerland and of Italy, by the people of Hungary in the stone age, and by the Egyptians on the evidence of a brick of a pyramid in which a grain was imbedded, and to which the date of 3359 B. C. has been assigned.

The existence of names for wheat in the most ancient languages confirms this evidence of the antiquity of its culture in all the more temperate parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but it seems improbable that wheat has ever been found growing persistently in a wild state, although the fact has often been asserted by poets, travelers, and historians. In the "Odyssey," for example, we are told that wheat grew in Sicily without the aid of man, but a blind poet could not have seen this himself, and a botanical fact can hardly be accepted from a writer whose own existence has been contested. Diodorus repeats the tradition that Osiris found wheat and barley growing promiscuously in Palestine, but neither this nor other discoveries of persistent wild wheat seem to us to be credible, seeing that wheat does not appear to be endowed with a power of persistency except under culture.—Edinbury Review.