Diffusionists may also have found encouragement in 
Hatt’s (14) fascinating study of American and Indone- 
sian folklore which showed some remarkable similarities 
between the two, especially with respect to various ver- 
sions of the Corn Mother myth. For example, the origin 
of cultivated plants from a sacrificed child, an important 
motif in Indonesia, is also conspicuous in Peruvian myth- 
ology. Nevertheless, Hatt was compelled to conclude 
that if agriculture and myths reached America across the 
Pacific Ocean this must have taken place not all at once 
but at different times, He did not suggest diffusion in 
the opposite direction nor did he consider it a possibility, 
as Sauer seems to have, that a Corn Mother myth could 
have been diffused except as it accompanied the spread 
of a grain. 
The idea of a pre-Columbian interchange of plants be- 
tween the Old World and the New was virtually de- 
molished by Merrill (83). He showed that there is not 
only a lack of tangible evidence for such prehistoric dif- 
fusion but also that the presence of American plants in 
Asia soon after the discovery of America is easily and 
reasonably accounted for by the early Portuguese trade 
route established in 1500 from Brazil to Goa by way of 
the Cape of Good Hope. 
So far as maize is concerned, the case for its pre- 
Columbian occurrence in Asia, never a very convincing 
one, was considerably weakened when Mangelsdorf and 
Oliver (30) showed that the Assamese maize described 
by Stonor and Anderson is not at all unique and has 
close counterparts in Colombia and other parts of South 
America. The case has recently been weakened still more 
by new evidence presented by Ho (16) who, after a 
searching study of Chinese historical sources, concluded 
that maize was introduced into China early in the six- 
teenth century arriving there by both overland and mari- 
time routes. He states: 
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