The existence of the true spelt in ancient Egypt and the neighbouring countries seems to me yet more doubtful. The _olyra_ of the Egyptians, of which Herodotus speaks, was not the _olyra_ of the Greeks; some authors have supposed it to be rice, _oryza_.[1828] As to spelt, it is a plant which is not grown in such hot countries. Modern travellers from Rauwolf onwards have not seen it in Egyptian cultivation,[1829] nor has it been found in the ancient monuments. This is what led me to suppose[1830] that the Hebrew word _kussemeth_, which occurs three times in the Bible,[1831] ought not to be attributed to spelt, as it is by Hebrew scholars.[1832] I imagined it was perhaps the allied form, _T. monococcum_, but neither is this grown in Egypt. Spelt has no name in Sanskrit, nor in any modern Indian languages, nor in Persian,[1833] and therefore, of course, none in Chinese. European names, on the contrary, are numerous, and bear witness to an ancient cultivation, especially in the east of Europe. _Spelta_ in Saxon, whence the English name, and the French, _épeautre_; _Dinkel_ in modern German, _orkiss_ in Polish, _pobla_ in Russian,[1834] are names which seem to come from very different roots. In the south of Europe the names are rarer. There is a Spanish one, however, of Asturia, _escandia_,[1835] but I know of none in Basque. History, and especially philology, point to an origin in eastern temperate Europe and the neighbouring countries of Asia. We have to discover whether the plant has been found wild. Olivier,[1836] in a passage already quoted, says that he several times found it in Mesopotamia, in particular upon the right bank of the Euphrates, north of Anah, in places unfit for cultivation. Another botanist, André Michaux, saw it in 1783, near Hamadan, a town in the temperate region of Persia. Dureau de la Malle says that he sent some grains of it to Bosc, who sowed them at Paris and obtained the common spelt; but this seems to me doubtful, for Lamarck, in 1786,[1837] and Bosc himself, in the _Dictionnaire d’Agriculture_, article _Épeautre_ (spelt), published in 1809, says not a word of this. The herbariums of the Paris Museum contain no specimens of the cereals mentioned by Olivier. There is, as we have seen, much uncertainty as to the origin of the species as a wild plant. This leads me to attribute more importance to the hypothesis that spelt is derived by cultivation from the common wheat, or from an intermediate form at some not very early prehistoric time. The experiments of H. Vilmorin[1838] support this theory, for cross fertilizations of the spelt by the downy white wheat, and _vice versâ_, yield “hybrids whose fertility is complete, with a mixture of the characters of both parents, those of the spelt preponderating.” +2. Starch Wheat+—_Triticum dicoccum_, Schrank; _Triticum amyleum_, Seringe.