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Show 142 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 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 (Hordeacere and Avenacere), 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 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 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 shown 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 bas been shown 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 |