cyanin coloration and the presence or absence of bloom 
are the rule rather than the exception. To find the grayish 
bloom, one need go no further than corn’s closest rela- 
tive, teosinte. 
Finally, to link the Assamese maize with the ancient 
Bat-Cave corn described by Mangelsdorf and Smith 
(1949) by comparing both to sorghum is scarcely justi- 
fied. The Bat-Cave corn resembles sorghum in its small 
kernels, long glumes, and the fact that the upper glumes 
are as long or longer than the lower. These, however, 
are characteristics found in many varieties of pod corn. 
To emphasize the resemblance of maize to sorghum or 
to any other of the Old World relatives of maize without 
also calling attention to the existence of profound and 
fundamental botanical differences is to present a mislead- 
ing picture. Maize does, indeed, resemble sorghum in its 
general growth habit as well as in chromosome number, 
and it resembles its Asiatic relatives Coix, Schlerachne, 
Chionachne and Polytoca in being monoecious. It differs 
from all of these, however, either in the development of 
its florets or in the nature of its fruit case. Weatherwax, 
some years ago (1926), called attention to the superfici- 
ality of some of the resemblances between maize and its 
Oriental relatives. He states: 
In all the Maydeae the fruit is wholly or partly covered by an 
indurated shell, which is an especially attractive superficial indica- 
tion of relationship. Its relative absence in Zea may be explained 
by the unusually complicated covering of husks, or as a result of 
conscious selection by man. But this general occurrence of a hard 
shell is a deceptive analogy, rather than a homology. The indurated 
structure is a combination of a glume and an alveolus of the rachis 
in Tripsacum and Euchlaena [as well as in Zea], a spathe in Coix, 
and a glume in Polytoca, Schlerachne and Chionachne. A tendency 
toward induration of something connected with the fruit seems, 
therefore, to be all that the genera have in common, and this is 
possessed by so many other genera of grasses as to be of little sig- 
nificance in determining tribal relationships. 
[ 278 | 
