among those grown at high altitudes in Ecuador, Peru 
and Bolivia, although it is occasionally encountered in 
Guatemala' and Mexico. The inheritance of glabrousness 
(unpublished data) does not appear to be particularly 
complex and it is possible that the characteristic has ap- 
peared more than once in the evolution of maize under 
domestication. On the other hand, the fact that there is 
a large center of glabrous maize at high altitudes in South 
America may not be without significance in connection 
with a consideration of the early glabrous maize from 
Bat Cave which also grew at a relatively high altitude. 
"TASSELS 
Anderson and his co-workers (1942, 1944b, 1948) have 
repeatedly emphasized the importance of studying the 
maize tassel as a means of understanding the morphology 
of the ear, and in studying the tassel they have discov- 
ered an array of characteristics which promise to be in- 
valuable in the classification of living maize varieties. 
‘Tassels, however, are by no means as enduring as ears 
and cobs, nor are they so likely to be collected in great 
numbers by primitive peoples or deposited by them in 
refuse heaps or graves. Only five specimens of tassels 
were found in the Bat Cave remains, one in Stratum 
III, three in TV and one in V. 
The specimen in Stratum III consisted of a fragment 
of a lateral tassel branch. This included five nodes, of 
which three each bore an extra spikelet. This condition, 
first described by Cutler (1946) and called ‘‘multiplica- 
tion,’ iscommon in the maize varieties of South America. 
' Mangelsdorf and Cameron (1942) described as glabrous many va- 
rieties from Guatemala. This is an error in terminology. Most of the 
varieties described by them as glabrous, although lacking the promi- 
nent hairiness so characteristic of high-altitude varieties of Mexico 
and Central America, are actually hispid. 
[ 236 ] 
