Darwinism stated by Darwin himself · Charles Darwin
SAVAGE WISDOM IN THE CULTIVATION OF PLANTS.
We now know that man was sufficiently civilized to cultivate the ground at an immensely remote period; so that wheat might have been improved long ago up to that standard of excellence which was possible under the then existing state of agriculture. One small class of facts supports this view of the slow and gradual improvement of our cereals. In the most ancient lake-habitations of Switzerland, when men employed only flint-tools, the most extensively cultivated wheat was a peculiar kind, with remarkably small ears and grains. “While the grains of the modern forms are in section from seven to eight millimetres in length, the larger grains from the lake-habitations are six, seldom seven, and the smaller ones only four. The ear is thus much narrower, and the spikelets stand out more horizontally, than in our present forms.” So again with barley, the most ancient and most extensively cultivated kind had small ears, and the grains were “smaller, shorter, and nearer to each other, than in that now grown; without the husk they were two and one half lines long, and scarcely one and one half broad, while those now grown have a length of three lines, and almost the same in breadth.” These small-grained varieties of wheat and barley are believed by Heer to be the parent-forms of certain existing allied varieties, which have supplanted their early progenitors.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.