1251. Plants capable of extended naturalisation, and serviceable as articles of food or luxury, have been widely disseminated by the human race in their migrations. The cerealia afford a striking example. These important grasses known to the ancients, wheat, barley, oats, and rye, were the gifts of the Old World to the New. They are also importations into Europe; but the loose reports of the ancients, and the diligent researches of the moderns, alike leave us in ignorance of their native seat. Probability points to the conclusion that they have spread from the neighbourhood of the great rivers of Western Asia, the primitive location of the human family; and it is not impossible that in that imperfectly explored district, or further east on the Tartarian table-land, some of the cereals may yet be found growing spontaneously. The first wheat sown in North America, consisted of a few grains accidentally found by a negro slave of Cortes, among the rice taken for the support of his army. In South America the first wheat was brought to Lima by one of the early colonists, a Spanish lady, Maria d'Escobar. An ecclesiastic, Jose Rixi, was the first to sow it in the neighbourhood of Quito. 1252. Maize, or Indian corn (_Zea mays_), has been dispersed in the Old World from the New; and also a more important product, the potato (_Solanum tuberosum_), the use of which now extends from the extremity of Africa to Lapland. In Chili, the native country of the plant, it occurs at present in a wild state. The Spaniards imported it into Spain, and from thence it was communicated to Italy. It was first made known in England at a subsequent period from Virginia, having been received there from the Spanish colonists in South America, as it is not a native of intervening Mexico. 1253. The grape-vine, so extensively spread over Europe, is probably not indigenous in any part of it. It chiefly owes its diffusion there to the Romans, who received it from the Greeks, to whom it most likely immediately came from the country between the Black and Caspian Seas. The Romans introduced most of the finer European fruit-trees, some from Africa, as the pomegranate, but the great majority from Western Asia, as the orange, fig, cherry, peach, apricot, apple, and pear. A variety of the plum, the damson, or damascene, came from the neighbourhood of Damascus during the Crusades. The name of the damask-rose points to the importation of the plant from the same quarter into Europe. [Verse: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven."--ECCLESIASTES III.]