BOTANICAL STUDY AND HISTORY. 239
wild barley gathered by him on Mount Hermon was a head of wild
Emmer which lay undetected until 1873. Another botanist in
1906 found, in the same general locality, both Emmer and barley,
growing "wild" and in plenty side by side : if the statement of
Berosus has not yet been confirmed it may some day be, for
one botanist reports having seen it in the hills east of the Upper
Euphrates, and in 1910 another botanist found Emmer growing
"wild" in western Persia. Wild Emmer, like cultivated Einkorn,
has a fragile rachis : that the cultivated forms first raised in
Egypt may have shared this character is suggested by the fact
that in Abyssinia, where more cultivated varieties are grown
now than in any other country, the most primitive of these still
retain the fragile rachis of the Syrian wild Emmer. In central
and southern India, where Emmer cultivation is an ancient, but
now a limited and local activity, the only varieties grown have
the fragile rachis of these primitive Abyssinian ones, from which,
indeed, they hardly differ. But whether in this fact we see, as
Prof. Percival suggests, proof of early intercourse between Habshi
and Hind, or if, as seems more probable, Emmer was an ancient
gift of Chaldsea to India, must remain for the present an open ques-
tion. Except in Serbia, Emmer cultivation has ceased in
regions that are or have been under Ottoman rule, and the only
countries where Emmer varieties are now extensively grown are
Abyssinia and southern Russia. Their limited cultivation, mainly
as a fodder, by the Basques in Spain, by Caucasian tribes, and to a
lesser extent in parts of France, Switzerland, southern Germany,
Italy and Serbia, though something more than "a relic of the
"past," is a survival from Renaissance days, when they were
known as Amelkorn, because starch (amylum) was prepared from
their grain. In mediaeval times they are alluded to in glossaries
from the VIII, to the XIII. centuries, and identified as being the
Latin far : one gloss on Predentius, who died in 861 a.d., which
Prof. Percival quotes, says expressly that "far is a kind of corn
which is called einerum by the Celts of Gaul."
This Latin name far, from which, Pliny tells us, came the
term farina, is the linguistic equivalent of the Greek πυρός, but
long before Pliny wrote, that Greek word had ceased to include,
if it ever did connote, the grain used along with barley as "fodder
"for horses," which is termed ζείαι in the Odyssey and όλυραι
in the Iliad : the passages in which these names occur are so simi-