CHAPTER VIII
THE CEREALS AND GRASSES
Of all the plants connected with the economies of mankind the grasses hold easily the first place. Not only are the seeds of certain species the chief food of nearly all peoples, but the plants themselves are the food of most animals whose flesh is used as meat. Wheat, maize, and rice are used by all except a very few peoples; and about all the animals used for food, fish and mollusks excepted, are grain eaters, or grass eaters, or both.
The grasses of the Plains in Texas, the Veldt in South Africa, and the hills of New Zealand by nature's processes are converted into meat that feeds the great cities of western Europe and the eastern United States. The corn of the Mississippi valley becomes the pork which, yielded from the carcasses of more than forty million swine, is exported to half the countries of the world. Even the two and one-half billion pounds of wool consumed yearly is converted grass.
Wheat.—The wheat of commerce is the seed of several species of cereal grass, one of which, Triticum sativum, is the ordinary cultivated plant. Wild species are found in the highlands of Kurdistan, in Greece, and in Mesopotamia, that are identical with species cultivated to-day. It is thought that the cultivation of the grain began in Mesopotamia, but it is also certain that it was grown by the Swiss lake-dwellers far back in prehistoric times. It is the "corn" Joseph's brothers sought to buy when they went to Egypt, and the records of its harvesting are scattered all over the pages of written history.
THE GRAIN CROP—MODERN METHODS OF CULTIVATION AND HARVESTING