Profitable plants : a description of the principal articles of vegetable origin used for food, clothing, tanning, dyeing, building, medicine, perfumery, etc / by Thomas Croxen Archer.

  • Thomas Croxen Archer
Date:
[1865]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Profitable plants : a description of the principal articles of vegetable origin used for food, clothing, tanning, dyeing, building, medicine, perfumery, etc / by Thomas Croxen Archer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    than four-fifths of the human race is formed from the small grains of various grasses, which, even if they required no more labour than merely collecting and preparing, would at least enforce industry; but requiring, as they do, careful cultivation in well-worked soil, it is indeed only with the sweat of the brow that we can eat the bread which is neces- sary to our existence. Foremost in the rank of food-products, and especially of those called cereals, stands Wheat, too well known to re- quire any particular description. It is a true grass (be- longing to the Natural Order Graminacece), but has been so changed by cultivation that we are totally ignorant of its natural state*. Botanists have named it Triticum hybernum, or Triticum vulgare, variety /3 hybernum, Winter W heat,— this is the commonest kind of wheat; another, which is almost, as well known, is called Triticum vulgare, variety a testivum, or Summer Wheat. The former is biennial in its habits—that is, it is sown one year and flowers and fruits * Unless the experiments of M. Fabre may be relied upon. He states that he found by successive experiments upon the apparently insignifi- cant grass JSgilops ovata, that it first sported (as gardeners call it) JE. triticoides, and from that, by successive changes, extending over seve- ral years, it passed to wheat itself,—not so fine as our highly cultivated varieties, but nevertheless wheat it was, unmistakeably.
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