BOTANICAL STUDY AND HISTORY. 243
which Theophrastus named ''Thracian wheat" with Spelt :
though this identification may be correct it can only be regarded
as conjectural. The name Spolia first occurs, as Prof. Percival
points out, in a decree issued by Diocletian in 301 a.d. It occurs
again in a late Latin poem written at the beginning of the
5th century of our era. We learn more about the crop from
St. Jerome, who was born in a town near the Pannonian frontier,
which was afterwards pillaged and burned by the Goths. This
eminent author, who died in 424 a.d., believed Spelt to be a
cereal of Germanic origin ; knew that it was cultivated as a crop-
by the early inhabitants of Pannonia: and supposed it to be
the far of early Latin authors. Evidently St. Jerome did not
know as much as modern Italian peasants do : their name for
the Dinkel is 'spelta' ; the Emmer, which Pliny termed far,
is their ' grano farro' still. But if St. Jerome has not misled those
who still grow the crop, we may trace to his misconception the
pertinacity with which the compilers of lexicons and encyclo-
paedias continue to refer to the Emmer as a Spelt.
The remaining members of the 'series' with 21 pairs of
chromosomes constitute a closely allied group with a history
as ancient as that of the Locular or of Emmer. One of these
' races,' recognised as distinct, for the first time, by Prof. Percival,
is Triticum sphaerococcum, or Dwarf Indian Wheat, which differs
from all other known living 'races' in having small spherical
grains. The cultivation of this 'race' is confined to a few
circumscribed localities in North-West India : its grains
occasionally appear, mixed with those of other wheats, from
Persia : it is the only wheat whose grain has been found in the
buried cities of the ancient civilization that flourished on the
Lower Indus plain, contemporaneously with the culture which
prevailed in Mesopotamia : one of Mr. Woolley's latest finds at.
Ur is a seal, with the characteristic symbol and script of one
of the leading Lower Indus cities, in a stratum which can be
dated with certainty at 2700 b.c. It may well be that the
cereal 'resembling' πυρός, which Strabo tells us was seen
by Aristobulus in cultivation among the Musicani in Seinde,
was this crop : he would hardly have used the qualification had
it been one of the ordinary races of Persian or Indian wheat.
But whether what Aristobulus saw was or was not T. sphaero-
coccum, it is certain that the present culture of this race in India