GRAINS OF PARADISE, Guinea Grains, or Melegueta Pepper (Ger. Paradieskörner, Fr. graines de Paradis, maniguette), the seeds of Amomum Melegueta, a reed-like plant of the natural order Zingiberaceae. It is a native of tropical western Africa, and of Prince’s and St Thomas’s islands in the Gulf of Guinea, is cultivated in other tropical countries, and may with ease be grown in hothouses in temperate climates. The plant has a branched horizontal rhizome; smooth, nearly sessile, narrowly lanceolate-oblong alternate leaves; large, white, pale pink or purplish flowers; and an ovate-oblong fruit, ensheathed in bracts, which is of a scarlet colour when fresh, and reaches under cultivation a length of 5 in. The seeds are contained in the acid pulp of the fruit, are commonly wedge-shaped and bluntly angular, are about 1¼ lines in diameter and have a glossy dark-brown husk, with a conical light-coloured membranous caruncle at the base and a white kernel. They contain, according to Flückiger and Hanbury, 0.3% of a faintly yellowish neutral essential oil, having an aromatic, not acrid taste, and a specific gravity at 15.5° C of 0.825, and giving on analysis the formula C20H32O, or C10H16 + C10H16O; also 5.83% of an intensely pungent, viscid, brown resin.
Grains of paradise were formerly officinal in British pharmacopoeias, and in the 13th and succeeding centuries were used as a drug and a spice, the wine known as hippocras being flavoured with them and with ginger and cinnamon. In 1629 they were employed among the ingredients of the twenty-four herring pies which were the ancient fee-favour of the city of Norwich, ordained to be carried to court by the lord of the manor of Carleton (Johnston and Church, Chem. of Common Life, p. 355, 1879). Grains of paradise were anciently brought overland from West Africa to the Mediterranean ports of the Barbary states, to be shipped for Italy. They are now exported almost exclusively from the Gold Coast. Grains of paradise are to some extent used illegally to give a fictitious strength to malt liquors, gin and cordials. By 56 Geo. III. c. 58, no brewer or dealer in beer shall have in his possession or use grains of paradise, under a penalty of £200 for each offence; and no druggist shall sell the same to a brewer under a penalty of £500. They are, however, devoid of any injurious physiological action, and are much esteemed as a spice by the natives of Guinea.
See Bentley and Trimen, Medicinal Plants, tab. 268; Lanessan, Hist. des Drogues, pp. 456-460 (1878).
GRAIN TRADE. The complexity of the conditions of life in the 20th century may be well illustrated from the grain trade of the world. The ordinary bread sold in Great Britain represents, for example, produce of nearly every country in the world outside the tropics.
Wheat has been cultivated from remote antiquity. In a wild state it is practically unknown. It is alleged to have been found growing wild between the Euphrates and the Tigris; but the discovery has never been authenticated, General considerations. and, unless the plant be sedulously cared for, the species dies out in a surprisingly short space of time. Modern experiments in cross-fertilization in Lancashire by the Garton Brothers have evolved the most extraordinary “sports,” showing, it is claimed, that the plant has probably passed through stages of which until the present day there had been no conception. The tales that grains of wheat found in the cerements of Egyptian mummies have been planted and come to maturity are no longer credited, for the vital principle in the wheat berry is extremely evanescent; indeed, it is doubtful whether wheat twenty years old is capable of reproduction. The Garton artificial fertilization experiments have shown endless deviations from the ordinary type, ranging from minute seeds with a closely adhering husk to big berries almost as large as sloes and about as worthless. It is conjectured that the wheat plant, as now known, is a degenerate form of something much finer which flourished thousands of years ago, and that possibly it may be restored to its pristine excellence, yielding an increase twice or thrice as large as it now does, thus postponing to a distant period the famine doom prophesied by Sir W. Crookes in his presidential address to the British Association in 1898. Wheat well repays careful attention; contrast the produce of a carelessly tilled Russian or Indian field and the bountiful yield on a good Lincolnshire farm, the former with its average yield of 8 bushels, the latter with its 50 bushels per acre; or compare the quality, as regards the quantity and flavour of the flour from a fine sample of British wheat, such as is on sale at almost every agricultural show in Great Britain, with the produce of an Egyptian or Syrian field; the difference is so great as to cause one to doubt whether the berries are of the same species.
It may be stated roundly that an average quartern loaf in Great Britain is made from wheat grown in the following countries in the proportions named:—
| U.S.A. | U.K. | Russia. | Argentina. | British India. | Canada. | Rumania- Bulgaria. | Australia. | Other Countries. |
| Oz. | Oz. | Oz. | Oz. | Oz. | Oz. | Oz. | Oz. | Oz. |
| 26 | 13 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Or expressed in percentages as follows:— | ||||||||
| 40 | 20 | 14 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
For details connected with grain and its handling see [Agriculture], [Corn Laws], [Granaries], [Flour], [Baking], [Wheat], &c.
Wheat occupies of all cereals the widest region of any food-stuff. Rice, which shares with millet the distinction of being the principal food-stuff of the greatest number of human beings, is not grown nearly as widely as is wheat, the staple food of the white races. Wheat grows as far south as Patagonia, and as far north as the edge of the Arctic Circle; it flourishes throughout Europe, and across the whole of northern Asia and in Japan; it is cultivated in Persia, and raised largely in India, as far south as the Nizam’s dominions. It is grown over nearly the whole of North America. In Canada a very fine wheat crop was raised in the autumn of 1898 as far north as the mission at Fort Providence, on the Mackenzie river, in a latitude above 62°—or less than 200 m. south of the latitude of Dawson City—the period between seed-time and harvest having been ninety-one days. In Africa it was an article of commerce in the days of Jacob, whose son Joseph may be said to have run the first and only successful “corner” in wheat. For many centuries Egypt was famous as a wheat raiser; it was a cargo of wheat from Alexandria which St Paul helped to jettison on one of his shipwrecks, as was also, in all probability, that of the “ship of Alexandria whose sign was Castor and Pollux,” named in the same narrative. General Gordon is quoted as having stated that the Sudan if properly settled would be capable of feeding the whole of Europe. Along the north coast of Africa are areas which, if properly irrigated, as was done in the days of Carthage, could produce enough wheat to feed half of the Caucasian race. For instance, the vilayet of Tripoli, with an area of 400,000 sq. m., or three times the extent of Great Britain and Ireland, according to the opinion of a British consul, could raise millions of acres of wheat. The cereal flourishes on all the high plateaus of South Africa, from Cape Town to the Zambezi. Land is being extensively put under wheat in the pampas of South America and in the prairies of Siberia.