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Show ANNOTATIO S AND ADDITIONS. 143 Geographie des Plantes, 1 05, p. 2 .) Reinhold Forster, who before hi voyage with Captain Cook, made by order of the Empress Catherine an expedition into Southern Rus ia 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 tq Saratow and the Caspian, al o herborized 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 sta.te 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 Ramadan 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. !3, pectinata) in the Pontic 1\lountains, 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 oxiginally wild "Hordeum zeocriton" of Linnreus. (Carl Koch Beitrage 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 bad been made in front of the convent, on what is now the Plazuela de San Francisco, after cutting down the |