Now, of the three main foods of the human race, flesh, rice, and wheat, wheat is the best suited to be a world-food. Flesh becomes too expensive once the wild game of the forests is destroyed; and it is not suitable for food in tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is not a flesh-forming food, and so is not suited for food in cold countries. Wheat is the one food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux as for the South Sea Islander. It is not easily spoiled, as milk and fruits are; and it contains all the elements that are needed by the body and in just about the right proportion. Wheat, to the botanist, is a grass--"a degraded lily," to quote from Grant Allen. It was originally a flower that was tamed by man and trained from beauty to usefulness. We do not know when or where the prehistoric Burbank lived who undertook this education of the wheat-lily. But we do know that wheat has been a food for at least five thousand years. We find it in the oldest tombs of Egypt and pictured on the stones of the Pyramids. We know that Solomon sent wheat as a present to his friend, the King of Tyre; and we have reason to believe that its first appearance was in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, near where the ancient city of Babylon rose to greatness. [Illustration: Chart Showing Relative Distribution of Values by Producing Countries in 1908 of World's Production of Five Principal Grains. Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000] [Illustration: Chart Showing Relative Values in 1908 of World's Production of the Five Principal Grains. Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000] Wheat is not a wild weed. It is a tame and transient plant--a plant of civilization. It could not continue to exist without man, and man, perhaps, could not exist except in the tropical countries without wheat. Each needs the other. If the human race were to perish from the face of the earth, wheat might survive for three years, but no longer. So close has this co-operation been between wheat and civilized man, that an eminent German writer, Dr. Gerland, maintains with a wealth of evidence that wheat was the original cause of civilization, partly because it was the first good and plentiful food, and partly because it was wheat that persuaded primitive man to forsake his wars and his wanderings and to learn the peaceful habits of agriculture. In any case, whatever its earlier history may have been, wheat is to-day the chief food of the civilized races of mankind. It is the main support of 600,000,000 people. It has overcome its natural enemies--weeds, fungus diseases, insects, and drought,--and attained a crop total of 3,500,000,000 bushels a year. To the intelligent, purposeful nations that have become the masters of the human race, wheat is now the staff of life, the milk of Mother Earth, the essence of soil and air and rain and sunshine.