Crop oats, like wheat, have ever been considered as a direct gift from Ceres, and few, indeed, amongst scientific men were willing to believe that they were derived from a wild and weed species. Still, the farmer had long maintained that oats, when cultivated, often left behind them weed oats; and in some districts of Worcester, Gloucester, and Warwick, we have known men refuse to grow oats as a crop from their fear of producing the terrible weed, which, indeed, the wild oat is on all hands admitted to be. Now, although we by no means wish to advance the theory of transmutation, and cannot believe that by any plan barley can be converted into oats, or oats into barley, we are yet confident that what has been termed _ennobling_, or the producing of a cultivated plant from a wild one, is oftentimes comparatively easy, and in none more so than in the production of crop oats from the wild species, _Avena fatua_. Professor Lindley, in the article “Avena,” in Morton’s _Cyclopædia of Agriculture_, suggests that the cultivated oat “is a domesticated variety of some wild species, and may be not improbably referred to _Avena strigosa_, bristle-pointed oat;” but our experiments would show that the _Avena fatua_ is the form from which at least the domestic sorts in general cultivation seem to have sprung. The _Avena fatua_ (wild oat) is an annual grass which almost universally accompanies agrarian circumstances; that is to say, it seldom, if ever, occurs in a truly wild aboriginal state, and is therefore not found in uncultivated tracts, but is the common attendant on tillage, and in some soils is a most common and disagreeable weed in various agricultural crops, but more especially amid grain, whether of wheat, barley, or oats. Sometimes it is found with beans, peas, and vetches, and, indeed, it may be said to be a common weed in some districts in any crop from which it has not been eradicated by the hoe—an operation almost impossible in grain, as its growth is so much like that of the crop itself. It is a tall grass, rivalling the height of the finest cultivated oat crop, from some forms of which, and especially those with a lax panicle, it is at first not easily distinguished; however, a more careful examination and comparison with the so-called _Avena sativa_ (cultivated oat) enables us to make out the following differences:— _Avena fatua, L._ _Avena fatua_, var. _sativa_.