previous next

CHAP. 11.—SPELT.

Of all these grains barley is the lightest,1 its weight rarely exceeding fifteen pounds to the modius, while that of the bean is twenty-two. Spelt is much heavier than barley, and wheat heavier than spelt. In Egypt they make a meal2 of olyra,3 a third variety of corn that grows there. The Gauls have also a kind of spelt peculiar to that country: they give it the name of "brace,"4 while to us it is known as "sanldala:" it has a grain of remarkable whiteness. Another difference, again, is the fact that it yields nearly four pounds more of bread to the modius than any other kind of spelt. Verrius states that for three hundred years the Romans made use of no other meal than that of corn.

1 Oats and rye excepted.

2 Here the word "far" means "a meal," or "flour," a substitute for that of "far," or "spelt."

3 Triticum monococcum, according to some. Fée identifies it with the Triticum spelta of Linnæus.

4 A variety, probably, of the Triticum hibernum of Linnæus, with white grains; the white-wheat of the French, from which the ancient Gauls made their malt; hence the French word "brasser," to "brew."

The Natural History. Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (19 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (10):
    • Harper's, Gallia
    • Harper's, Scriptūra
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), CENSOR
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), INFA´MIA
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), LEX
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), LOCUPLE´TES
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), SCRIPTU´RA
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), CAMPA´NIA
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), PUTE´OLI
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), VERONA
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (9):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: