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After which comes the long sermon,

chapter, and the announcements. and another prayer. The people have taken no part except in the hymns. I cannot but think that if the Mass had been translated into French, leaving out everything which was not sanctioned in the Divine Word, and making it more edifying where needed, doing in fact what the English Church did, it would have been more likely in worship to have succeeded. I had hoped to see the Rev. M. Soyson Père Hyacinthe attempt such an enterprise as I have sketched, but he seems to have shrunk from such an undertaking.

Another defect in the French Protestant Church, as it has appeared to me, has been its deficiency in those good works which affect the common people. They have had no Sunday-schools. They have had no equivalents for what Methodism did in this country. I should like them to have had French Wesleys and Protestant Vincent de Pauls. They have been too respectable. I hope they are not dying of respectability. But I always feel a great sympathy with them, few as they are, compared with the multitudes around them, and a strong desire to see them affect the noble French nation more powerfully than they have ever yet done, for the Word of God, and for good in every way.

Monday, September 17th, I left Dijon at six in the morning, and rode all day through the fertile plains of France, staying an hour at Lyons in the middle of the day, and then passing by Avignon to Montelimart, a small town in a beautiful neighbourhood. This town has not more than six thousand inhabitants, yet it has a pretty little park near the station, with seats for the inhabitants, and a very good fountain.

I wonder why we have not more fountains-real good fountainsin our English towns. The French have not half as much water as we have, nor such convenient heights to get water from, yet you find admirable fountains sparkling in the sun, beautiful, refreshing, and giving you everywhere a sense of coolness and content.

At nine the next morning I passed on to Arles, where there are extensive Roman remains, which was formerly the metropolis of Roman Gaul, and where a very early Council of the Church, called by Constantine, was held in 314, at which three British bishops, it is recorded, were present, and 600 bishops in all, each chief minister of a congregation being at that time a bishop. Arles is on the river Rhone, about thirty-eight miles from Marseilles, and though it decayed in the Middle Ages, it is now an improving town. There is a noble amphitheatre complete from Roman times, an immense structure.

have seen now, I believe, all these great buildings remaining, including the Coliseum at Rome. There are also the remains of a theatre, an imperial palace, numerous tombs, altars, and tablets. There is also at Arles an obelisk from Egypt, fifty-five feet high, the tallest in Europe. The Roman stone coffins and altars are remarkable for the tender dedications of children to their parents, of wives to husbands, and husbands to wives, indicating the warmth and strength of family attachment among them. And we know from other sources that it was more than six hundred years after the foundation of Rome before a case of divorce occurred, so pure were the family relations. The power of the Roman Empire arose from this compact and intense family affection.

This is called the French land of olives. One observes olive trees in thousands as we pass along. In the sunshine the leaves, which are light underneath, glitter like silver, and the fruit has a reddish golden hue, thus representing silvery truth and golden fruits of love.

I learned something this morning which I had not before known. There continually came in view long lines of mulberry trees, and they looked so fresh and full of leaf that I enquired when the leaves were taken off to feed the silkworms. "In the month of May," said a wellinformed gentleman, who sat opposite to me in the train. "But," he added, "they are taken off from time to time to feed the cattle.” Thus these valuable trees serve two purposes.

There was much maize (Indian corn) growing and partly cut. I observed also a taller plant, which I did not recollect to have seen before. I enquired, and found it was the sugar-cane. I set off again in the evening, and reached about nine the noble city of Marseilles.

SCRIPTURE BOTANY.
(LEO GRINDON.)
THE CEREALIA.

EXCEPTING maize or Indian-corn, and the so-called "wild rice" of Canada, which some say will become eminently important, the cereals are all natives of the eastern hemisphere. But the original forms of most of them, if they have not become absolutely extinct, are no longer satisfactorily determinable. Botanists are in the same position with regard to them that they would be did the question apply to the original or primeval form of the apple were every hedgerow crab to have disappeared, leaving no tradition or record as to the genealogy. That apparently wild forms of the chief of the Old World Cerealia occur in western Asia, is quite true; but these,

in all likelihood, correspond with the so-called wild fruits and vegetables which occur in the by-ways of England, presenting the appearance of aborigines, but in reality only waifs and strays of a long-past cultivation. The plants which go by the name of wheat-grass, oatgrass, barley-grass, millet-grass, etc., are so designated because of resemblance in the structure of the flowers. They are neither rudimentary conditions nor degenerate forms of the cereals with which their names seem to connect them, unless, possibly, in one case, that of the Avena fatua, we may have the original parent of the Avena sativa.

WHEAT (Triticum vulgare).—Whatever may have been the history of the rise and progress of the cultivation of the wheat-plant prior to the time of the Hebrews, it had clearly taken a foremost position when the annals of their nation commence. The birthplace of this invaluable plant, the noblest and most precious of the cereals, Sprengel thinks, may have been northern India. It has been ascribed also to the north of Persia, and emphatically to the shores of the Caspian. Within our own century an entirely new idea has been suggested as to its beginning. It is said that a curious little grass called Egilops, to-day found in plenty on certain parts of the borders of the Mediterranean, may by careful culture be converted into wheat. In a matter of this nature, to be too ready with a denial of the possibility of the thing is at any time unwise. For the present, however, the discovery is one of those which await confirmation. Wheat, without question, is one of the most variable of plants, and the fact is not without significance that the ancients laid its first habitat in Sicily.1 The variety most usually, or perhaps exclusively grown, in the primitive ages, appears to have been the very elegant one called from its long awns bearded wheat, and sometimes distinguished as a species under the name of Triticum æstivum. It is represented upon ancient coins and other works of art, and in every age has been the form of the plant which poetry and painting have delighted to honour. The common beardless wheat is differentiated by some as Triticum hibernum. Whether or not the very curious variety called Egyptian wheat, or Triticum compositum, the ears of which are constituted of a large one in the centre, and five or six smaller ears jutting from near the base, was known to the ancients, there is no evidence

1 See, for all particulars, the Journal of the Agricultural Society, vol. xv.; the Intellectual Observer for 1867, vol. xi. p. 262; the Treasury of Botany, 1870, vol. i. p. 22; or the Dict. Classique d'Histoire Naturelle, Art. Ægilops.

to show. Certainly there is nothing to connect it with primeval Egyptian agriculture, or with the history of Joseph. The strange story of its having been raised from grains found in the hand of a mummy, though accepted by Schleiden, is now very generally discredited, more precise information seeming to indicate the existence of some sort of fraud.1

In the language of the ancient Hebrews wheat was called chittâh, a word also spelt chittha, chetteth, and cheteh. Floating, with the progress of time, into the languages of every one of the Teutonic and Scandinavian nations, this ancient appellation reappears in our current English one, the initials of "wheat" exactly corresponding, etymologically, to the ch of the Hebrew. It occurs in twenty-eight or twenty-nine different places in the Old Testament, and in every instance the Authorized Version translates correctly.

We have it in the history of Reuben and Leah, in the account of the plagues of Egypt, among the promised blessings of Canaan, and in the histories of Ruth and of Samson. The wheat of Minnith, a district in the country of the Ammonites, being particularly good, was exported to Tyre, and formed part of Solomon's annual present to Hiram. The people of Beth-shemesh were reaping their wheat when the Philistines restored the Ark. In Canticles vii. 2, the wheat-sheaf is employed as an image of corporeal beauty, the epithet "set about with lilies" referring probably to some pretty rustic custom observed at harvest-time. Wheat was the chief ingredient of the unleavened bread (Exod. xxix. 2). It is recognized as a worthy gift in 2 Sam. xvii. 28; as eligible tribute in 2 Chron. xxvii. 5; and as proper in oblations (Ezek. xlv. 13). Gideon, apprehensive of a visit from the thievish Midianites, was threshing wheat privately when the angel summoned him to the destruction of the image of Baal (Judges vi. 11). In other places wheat stands as the expressive name of substantial nourishment; in others again, metaphorically, for spiritual good, as in Deut. xxxii. 14, Ps. lxxxi. 16, and Ps. cxlvii. 14. Samuel invokes a thunderstorm upon the wheat-fields of the sinful (i. 12, 17). Job says, if wrong has been done, "Let thistles grow instead of wheat" (xxxi. 40); and Jeremiah, that "the wicked sow wheat, but shall reap thorns" (xii. 13). Joel i. 11, after the same manner, pictures spiritual defection by the wheat-fields coming to nought. Other references to chittah, or wheat absolutely, occur in Exod. xxxiv. 22;1 Chron. xxi. 20; 2 Chron. ii. 15; 2 Sam. iv. 6; Isaiah xxviii. 25; Jer. xli. 8; Ezek. iv. 9.

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1 See the Gardeners' Chronicle, Aug. 15, 1863, p. 775.

In Prov. xxvii. 22, in the Authorized Version, wheat stands as the rendering of yet another term:-"Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him." Here the original Hebrew is rephoth or riphoth, which term does not seem to point to any one kind of grain or seed absolutely, but to intend anything reducible to the condition of what in England we call groats. Rephoth also occurs in 2 Sam. xvii. 19, where it is translated "ground corn.' When in Ezra vi. 9 and vii. 22 we read of wheat, it represents the Chaldee word hintin or chintin, and, according to Gesenius, correctly so. It is well known that Chaldee, instead of the more finished language of the Old Testament in general, is employed not only in certain parts of Ezra (iv. 8 to vi. 18, and vii. 12-26), but in Genesis xxxi. 47, Jeremiah x. 11, and Daniel ii. 4 to vii. 28.

Whenever in the New Testament mention is made of wheat, say, upon nine or ten occasions, in the original it is called ouros. In the secular Greek authors this term is a general one, and is extended to meal and flour, to rations, the contents of a granary, and even to meat, or solid food, as opposed to drink. Wheat absolutely is, in the secular authors, πupos, as, on various occasions, in Homer, but this word the New Testament never once employs. In the account given by the evangelists of our Lord's walking through the cornfields on the Sabbath-day, the original word is σropos, literally, sown or arable land, as opposed to natural pasture. The chief places in which σUTOS occurs are in the parable of the sowing of the tares, in the parable of the unjust steward, and in St. Paul's famous imagery of the Resurrection. The ship in which he was exposed to the storm was lightened by throwing part of its cargo of σuros into the sea. In Matt. iii. 12, and in the parallel passage in Luke iii. 17, it is employed as a figure for the regenerated: "He will gather His wheat into the garner, but will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." In Luke xxii. 31 wheat is again the subject of a celebrated comparison; and in the Apocalypse it constitutes part of the merchandise of the spiritual Babylon (vi. 6, xviii. 13). In one or two places the Authorized Version renders σros by "corn."

SPELT (Triticum Spelta).—Spelt, except in quality, is a near relative of wheat, and is by some botanists regarded as no more than a very strongly-marked variety. A characteristic feature is that the husk adheres to the grain, so that a particular kind of millstone is required for the effectual grinding. It contains less nutritive matter than

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