THE PLANT WORLD UNDER CARE 



371 



When the Corn Was Learning How. 



BY EDWARD F. BIGELOW, ARCADIA : SOUND 

 BEACH, CONNECTICUT. 



Corn or Zca mays is merely an over- 

 grown grass or, as the botanist would 

 put it, a member of the family Gramineae 

 and is closely related to such grasses 

 as wheat, and indeed to those more 

 abundant forms that one sees almost 

 everywhere by the roadside. In these 

 grasses, the seed is perfected in the 

 head, a method that answers well for 

 those that do not develop a very heavy 

 weight of seed. That the corn is a 

 grass is evident to the botanist, as he 

 examines in detail the structure of the 

 plant and evident to the observing 



farmer, who occasionally finds the seed 

 growing and becoming perfected on 

 the tassel. If he is careless he thinks 

 of it as a freak of nature ; if he is 

 thoughtful, he sees, by means of this 

 circumstantial evidence, a portion of 

 the path by which this grass has come 

 to its final development. It is compar- 

 able to the idiosyncratic pronuncia- 

 tions of the cultured person who has 

 spent his early days in an uncultured 

 home with uncultured people; we all 

 know that the expert can tell by his 

 accent from what part of the country 

 the person, though a complete stranger, 

 has come. So there are little peculiar- 

 ities noticeable here and there in this 

 corn grass that reveals a part of the 



CORN GROWING IN THE HEAD (TASSEL) WITH ITS "SILK.' 



