shewn 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 Géographie des Plantes, 1805, p. 28.) Reinhold Forster, who before his voyage with Captain Cook, made by order of the Empress Catherine an expedition into Southern Russia 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 to Saratow and the Caspian, also herborised 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 state 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 Hamadan 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. β pectinata) in the Pontic Mountains, 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 originally wild “Hordeum zeocriton” of Linnæus. (Carl Koch Beiträge zur Flora des Orients, Heft i. S. 139 and 142.)