BOTANICAL STUDY AND HISTORY. 237
The objection taken by Mr. Haldane to the hypothesis which
guided De Candolle in his study of the Origin of Cultivated Plants
is not so marked as an objection taken by Mr. Laufer, in his
"Sino-Iranica," to De Candolle's method. As to this, Mr. Laufer
remarks, "De Candolle has set a dangerous precedent to bo-
"tanists in whose writings this effect is still visible, and this is
"his over-valuation of purely linguistic data." That, in the case
of Chinese plants and their names, we may accept the objection
of a scholar so competent as Mr. Laufer, must be conceded : even
so judicious a systematic botanist as De Candolle was, may well
have relied too implicitly on the judgment of those scholars whose
works he consulted. But to economic botanists, changes in the
connotation of a name, as used now in different localities, are so
familiar that they are alive to the possibility that similar changes
may have taken place in one locality at different periods of time.
The difficulty economic botanists find greatest is to convince
linguistic friends, not only that the phenomenon is common, but
that it ever occurs. Wheat is one of the cultivated crops where
indications of such changes are frequent and where, therefore, it
is as essential to bear in mind the caution advocated by Mr. Laufer
as it is to observe the warning given by Mr. Haldane.
All botanists will agree with Prof. Percival and Mr. Haldane
that Triticum monococcum, the only cultivated Wheat with 7 pairs
of chromosomes, is one of the most primitive of cereal crops.
The Einkorn or Locular was one of the crops most widely grown
in Central Europe in Neolithic times : it survived into the Bronze
Age in Hungary and at Troy. The crop, as grown in Europe then,
was only a cultivated state of a wild Triticum widely distributed
in the Balkan Peninsula, the Crimea, the Eastern Caucasus, Asia
Minor and Kurdistan. A variety of this wild grass, which differs
from the typical form only in having a larger grain, is confined to
Asia Minor, Northern Syria and Eastern Turkestan. No trace
of the cultivated "race" has been found in ancient Egyptian
tombs : it does not occur in China, in India or in Persia. It is still
grown, mainly as a fodder, but at times to provide both bread
and beer, in parts of Asia Minor, of the Caucasus, the Balkans,
the Alps and Northern Spain : wherever this wheat is grown,
"its present culture," as Mr. Haldane says, "is a relic of the
"past."
Yet that culture need not be a survival from Neolithic days.