Barley has the widest range of distribution of all the _Cerealia_, and is cultivated from the extreme limits of culture in Lapland to the heights immediately beneath the equator. But it has by no means the same importance everywhere that it has in the northern region, where, in a little narrow zone, it appears as the sole bread-corn. In Lapland and northern Asia, rye soon appears beside it, but by the inclemency of the climate confined to favorable years, and therefore not properly to be regarded as the principal food. First in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia does the rye become the peculiar bread-corn; and wheat takes its place beside it in the north of Great Britain and Germany, as the rye before joined barley. In the centre of Germany, in the south of Great Britain, in France, and in a wide range toward the East, including the whole of the Caspian Sea, wheat is the prevailing cultivated plant, which in the basin of the Mediterranean and throughout North America is associated with maize. Rice takes the place of the latter in Egypt and in northern India, and holds undisputed rule in the peninsulas of India, in China, Japan, and the East Indian islands, shares it in the west coast of Africa with maize, which, on the other hand, is the exclusively cultivated corn-plant of the greatest part of tropical America, with only some unimportant exceptions. In southern America, Africa, and Australia wheat again enters the field with the decreasing temperature. The culture of _Tef_ and _Tocusso_ in Abyssinia, of millet in Western Africa and Arabia, as well as of _Eleusine_ and millet in the East Indies, are quite of subordinate importance.