tance of, anew food. Certainly the potato became much 
more quickly established in Ireland than in nearby Eng- 
land where it had been introduced even earlier. Also, it 
is known that both the Germans and the Scots strongly 
resisted the potato until famine dispelled their prejudice. 
Perhaps the rapidity with which a new plant is adopted 
by any people is less a function of their progressiveness 
than of their need. Seen from this viewpoint, the rapid 
spread of maize in Asia is not at all astonishing. In the 
light of the history of the potato in Ireland, post-Colum- 
bian time has been ample, and more than ample, for the 
introduction of maize into Asia and for its establishment 
as a staple crop. 
The Origin of New World Cultivated Cotton 
and Its Bearing on Asiatic Maize 
Stonor and Anderson, to support their argument for an 
origin or a pre-Columbian distribution of maize in Asia, 
cite the hypothesis of Hutchinson, Silow and Stephens 
(1947) which postulates that the New World cultivated 
cottons are tetraploid hybrids of a wild American diploid, 
probably Gossypium Raimond, and a cultivated diploid, 
G. arboreum, introduced from Asia by man crossing the 
Pacific after the invention of agriculture in Asia. This 
hypothesis has also been cited by others (Carter, 1950; 
Zelinsky, 1950) as evidence of pre-Columbian trans- 
Pacific diffusion. It should perhaps be pointed out that 
many botanists, including the senior author of this paper, 
although they recognize the hypothesis as stimulating 
and provocative, are quite critical of it on genetic and 
botanical grounds. The reasons for this are several. 
First, there isno more need of explaining the distribu- 
tion of the Old and New World cottons in terms of 
man’s peregrinations than there is of accounting for the 
range of numerous other genera which have a similar 
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