CHAPTER XXVI.
THE WILD OAT AS THE ORIGIN OF THE CULTIVATED VARIETIES.
Crop oats, like wheat, have ever been considered as a direct gift from Ceres, and few, indeed, amongst scientific men were willing to believe that they were derived from a wild and weed species. Still, the farmer had long maintained that oats, when cultivated, often left behind them weed oats; and in some districts of Worcester, Gloucester, and Warwick, we have known men refuse to grow oats as a crop from their fear of producing the terrible weed, which, indeed, the wild oat is on all hands admitted to be.
Now, although we by no means wish to advance the theory of transmutation, and cannot believe that by any plan barley can be converted into oats, or oats into barley, we are yet confident that what has been termed ennobling, or the producing of a cultivated plant from a wild one, is oftentimes comparatively easy, and in none more so than in the production of crop oats from the wild species, Avena fatua.
Professor Lindley, in the article “Avena,” in Morton’s Cyclopædia of Agriculture, suggests that the cultivated oat “is a domesticated variety of some wild species, and may be not improbably referred to Avena strigosa, bristle-pointed oat;” but our experiments would show that the Avena fatua is the form from which at least the domestic sorts in general cultivation seem to have sprung.
The Avena fatua (wild oat) is an annual grass which almost universally accompanies agrarian circumstances; that is to say, it seldom, if ever, occurs in a truly wild aboriginal state, and is therefore not found in uncultivated tracts, but is the common attendant on tillage, and in some soils is a most common and disagreeable weed in various agricultural crops, but more especially amid grain, whether of wheat, barley, or oats. Sometimes it is found with beans, peas, and vetches, and, indeed, it may be said to be a common weed in some districts in any crop from which it has not been eradicated by the hoe—an operation almost impossible in grain, as its growth is so much like that of the crop itself.
It is a tall grass, rivalling the height of the finest cultivated oat crop, from some forms of which, and especially those with a lax panicle, it is at first not easily distinguished; however, a more careful examination and comparison with the so-called Avena sativa (cultivated oat) enables us to make out the following differences:—
| Avena fatua, L. | Avena fatua, var. sativa. |
| The valves of the inner pales, which adhere to the seeds, thick, and covered with stiff hairs, especially towards the base. The external valve has a long stiff awn, which in the ripe seed is usually twisted at the lower part, and bent at nearly right angles at about the middle. The grain-seed very small and worthless. | The valves of the inner pales not so coarse as in A. fatua, and quite devoid of hairs. The outer valve with or without an awn, which when present is not so stiff as in the wild plant, sometimes twisted at the base, but seldom bent. Seeds large and full, forming the grain for which the crop is cultivated. |
The experiments about to be detailed were performed with the Avena fatua.