CO129-554-6 Hong Kong University- 1. Appointment of Dr. Chen Shas Yi as head of Chinese Department... 18-3-1935 - 28-10-1935 — Page 16

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A. H. CROOK

method the subject is treated there will be some readers who will want something different, some who will be disappointed that their particular pet hobby has not been sufficiently emphasised.

Mrs. Arber says her book was not logically planned but simply grew. Her own words are, she "allowed the book to write itself." This of course, must not be taken as the equivalent of the schoolboy's well-known cloak of excuse, "I didn't do it, Sir: it was my hand." The first few chapters all too short-give an account of the cereals, their putative homes, history, and relationships to their wild cousins. Considering that the whole of human existence and civilization is bound up with these cereals we are surprised that Mrs. Arber curtailed these chapters so much. Even at the expense of a book twice the size we need all the information we can get. One whole side of the question is shut out with the laconic words: "An account of cereal geography would be outside the scope of this book."

She offers no pronounced opinion on the relative antiquity of wheat, barley, rice and maize as domesticated plants, though if botanists could assist in settling this question, or throw some light on it, they would thereby greatly aid the solution of the whole vexed question of the priority of civil- ization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, or Peru.

Mrs. Arber mentions the interesting fact that maize is the only cereal which may not lead a feral existence: "it cannot propagate itself spontaneously, for the grain does not escape from the husks without help.” The most natural explanation of this fact would seem to be that the grain had been so long domesticated that it had lost the essential means of survival, whereas the other cereals were only on the way towards losing them. This of course is a supposition, but Mrs. Arber rather than assume it seems to prefer the derivation of the plant 'possibly by a process of hybridisation' from Teosinte (Euchlaena mexicana), the grass of nearest affinity to it in the New World. When Mrs. Arber says "the grain does not escape from the husks without help" we naturally wonder if there might not have been in days gone by, in the native home of the grain, a parrot or some such bird which might have been the effective ministrant. A plant like maize, which supplies en masse a proliferation of seed as in the corn-cob, could well afford to sacrifice 60% to 70% of each cob if it thereby got 5% to 10% disseminated. Some of the parots can handle a cob with great dexterity. But if the Indians of America adopted this grain as their chief domestic plant they would naturally kill out this enemy to their food supply.

Of the rice plant we are told that "the earliest record we have of it is in old Chinese writings and it has been cultivated continuously in that country since the remote past." When Mrs. Arber wrote her book Mr. Andersson's "Children of the Yellow Earth" was only in the press. In this latter work (p. 336) in speaking of the fragments of a jar from the Yang Shao civilization Mr. Andersson says:----

The Hong Kong Naturalist.