this process can be observed in many parts of North and 
South America today. 
A second possible answer, probably the correct one, 
was given, forty years before the question was raised, by 
Laufer who, as the result of his scholarly historical stud- 
ies, concluded that maize came into China, not from 
across the Pacific, but overland through Tibet from India. 
This conclusion is quite in harmony with the facts of both 
history and geography. Colombia, for example, where 
living counterparts of the Assamese maize are now known 
to occur, is actually appreciably nearer to Assam via the 
Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean and Africa than via 
the Pacific. Furthermore, the first route, being more 
largely a land route, does not demand the fabulous feats 
of navigation on the part of pre-Columbian people which 
the second does. 
This does not mean that Laufer’s conclusions on the 
introduction of maize into Asia are necessarily completely 
correct and final. However, until new evidence in con- 
flict with them is brought forward, they furnish a satis- 
factory explanation of the facts now at our command. 
This is recognized by Stonor and Anderson who state 
that accepting the morphological similarity of American 
and Asiatic maize as a premise, Laufer ‘‘could have come 
only to the conclusion he finally reached: that maize 
somehow got to Indian ports at an early post-Columbian 
date and spread overland via various primitive peoples to 
China.’ Since it can now be shown that the Assamese 
maize is indeed similar to American maize, the evidence 
presented by Stonor and Anderson tends to confirm 
rather than to contradict Laufer’s conclusions. 
In his part of their joint paper, Anderson emphasizes 
the resemblance of the Assamese maize in several char- 
acteristics to sorghum, the implication apparently being 
that this resemblance has some bearing upon the possi- 
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