My intelligent friend and teacher, Link, has however shown in a comprehensive and critical treatise,[GD] that these passages are open to much doubt. In a former essay of my own,[GE] I expressed doubts regarding the existence of wild cereals in Asia, and considered them to have become wild. Reinhold Forster, who before his voyage with Captain Cook made an expedition for purposes of natural history into the south of Russia by order of the Empress Catherine, reported that the two-lined summer barley (_Hordeum distichon_) grew wild near the confluence of the Samara and the Volga. At the end of September in the year 1829, Ehrenberg and myself also herborised on the Samara, during our journey from Orenburg and Uralsk to Saratow and the Caspian Sea. The quantity of wheat and rye plants growing wild on uncultivated ground in this district was certainly very remarkable; but the plants did not appear to us to differ from the ordinary kinds. Ehrenberg received from M. Carelin a species of rye, _Secale fragile_, that had been gathered on the Kirghis Steppe, and which Marshal Bieberstein for some time conjectured to be the mother plant of our cultivated rye, _Secale cereale_. Michaux’s herbarium does not show (according to Achill Richard’s testimony), that Spelt (_Triticum spelta_) grows wild at Hamadan in Persia, as Olivier and Michaux have been supposed to maintain. More confidence is due to the recent accounts obtained through the unwearied zeal of the intelligent traveller, Professor Carl Koch. He found a large quantity of rye (_Secale cereale var._ β, _pectinata_) in the Pontic Mountains, at heights of more than 5000 or 6000 feet above the level of the sea, on spots where this species of grain had not within the memory of the inhabitants been previously cultivated. “Its appearance here is the more important,” he remarks, “because with us this grain never propagates itself spontaneously.” Koch collected in the Schirwan part of the Caucasus a kind of grain which he calls _Hordeum spontaneum_, and regards as the originally wild _Hordeum zeocriton_. (Linn.)[GF]