It is a popular belief that wheat, in a state fit for food, was a direct gift to man, and handed down to him unaltered in form, except in so far as relates to varieties; but if we consider how varied are the details of this plant, how very different from each other are the more remote varieties, and yet how easy it is to fill up the links on the one hand, or to arrive at equally distinct and yet new forms on the other, we can only conclude that wheat, like most, if not all, our vegetable esculents, is but a _derivative_ plant obtained from a wild form of grass, and in very early times brought into cultivation because of the facilities for change which it was capable of undergoing. Nowhere is wheat, as such, found wild; for, although its grain has been cultivated in all parts of the world, its scattered seeds cannot maintain a position for any length of time; for, as it has been obtained by cultivation, so its derived status can only be maintained by careful culture, without which there seems reason to believe that cereal wheat would indeed become extinct. Many botanists had arrived at these or kindred views from observation and reasoning upon the subject, but it was not until a comparatively recent period that we possessed any direct evidence derived from experiment: this we now have, and upon it we quote the following from Mr. Bentham, in the _Cyclopædia of Agriculture_, article “Triticum”:— It has never been contended that their original types have become extinct, and various, therefore, have been the conjectures as to the transformations they may have successively undergone; and as no accidental returns towards primitive forms have been observed, we have till lately had but little to guide us in these vague surmises. Within the last few years, however, the experiments and observations of M. Esprit Fabre, of Agde, in the south of France, seem to prove a fact which had been more than once suggested, but almost always scouted, that our agricultural wheats are cultivated varieties of a set of grasses common in the south of Europe, which botanists have uniformly regarded as belonging to a different genus, named _Ægilops_. The principal character by which the latter genus had been distinguished, consisted in the greater fragility of the ear, and in the glumes (_i.e._ the chaff-scales) being generally terminated by three or four, and the pales by two or three points or awns (beards). But M. Fabre has shown how readily these characters become modified by cultivation; and, wide as is the apparent difference between _Ægilops ovata_ and common wheat, he has practically proved their botanical identity; for, from the seeds of the _Ægilops_ first sown in 1838, carefully raised in a garden soil, and re-sown every year from their produce, he had, through successive transformations, by the eighth year (1846)