240
THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
lar as to suggest that the two words are synonyms. Herodotus,
the contemporary of Hippocrates, held this view, and in another
passage remarked that in Egypt their grain was used in making
bread : in his day "Emmer" was still the only wheat grown in the
valley of the Nile. But Theophrastus, a century later, regarded
the two as distinct, and no longer included either in πυρός. The
discrepancy between the statements of the father of history and
the only real botanist the ancient world produced, though regarded
by scholars as irreconcilable, presents little difficulty to the
modern economic botanist. Finding that the two yielded grain
used for the same purpose, Herodotus may be excused for re-
garding them as identical; if, as might well have been the case,
one had awned glumes while the other was beardless, or if one had
a fragile, the other a tough rachis Theophrastus might well
have felt it desirable to regard them as different. Whatever
either author's view as regards όλυραι may have been, we have
reason to believe that, in their respective centuries, ζείαι still
meant to Greek cultivators the cereal termed ŝu by the Assyrians,
and known in Chaldea by its Sumerian name ZIZ. A. AN. What
we cannot tell now, is whether όλυραι meant to the Greek
soldiery who fought under Alexander what it meant to the poet
who described the deeds of Achilles and the wanderings of
Ulysses.
Though Emmer cultivation spread northward to Asia Minor
and thence westward to Europe, where it still survives, and south-
ward through Egypt, where it has ceased, to Abyssinia, where it
still prevails, it never became an activity of consequence in Iran
to the east. There is one variety of T. dicoccam peculiar to Persia
and, in Khorasan, Prof. Percival finds a distinct "race" of wheat
with 14 choromosomes, T. orientale, more closely related than
any other "race" to cultivated Emmer, but there, we learn
from Mr. Haldane, Emmer is grown not by Persians, but by
Armenian refugees. These Persian Emmers differ as much from
the primitive Indian and Abyssinian Emmers as the finer Abyss-
inian ones differ from the modern European varieties, for which,
in all probability, the west was as indebted to Asia Minor as it
was for the Einkorn or Locular.
Before we leave the two "races" of wheat that are certainly
only cultivated forms of two wild "species," we have to bear in
mind that White of Selborne once made it plain that living things