by contemporary experience, on mankind’s capacity to 
spread, through trade and other means, the world’s prod- 
ucts. So far as Europe and Africa are concerned, the 
early post-Columbian occurrence of maize is explained 
quite satisfactorily by Wright (46) who showed how the 
Moors, after being partially expelled from Spain between 
1499 and 1502, took maize with them to Tangier and the 
north African coast whence it rapidly spread to that part 
of the world which lay around the Mediterranean Sea, 
i.e., Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. Wright explains further 
that the name ““Turk’’ in England during the sixteenth 
century was often used indiscriminately with ‘‘Moor”’ 
to indicate a Moslem. It seems probable, therefore, that 
maize at one period was obtained more easily in western 
Europe from the Moslem regions of the Mediterranean 
than from the West Indies and hence was known to the 
English as ‘“Turkey corn’’ (both Egypt and Syria were 
then parts of Turkey) and to the Italians as grano turco. 
Perhaps the belief, held by a number of the herbalists, 
that maize came from the East was based on nothing 
more than the fact that its common name seemed clearly 
to indicate an eastern origin. Some recent modern con- 
clusions regarding its origin have had little more foun- 
dation in fact. 
THE PLACE oF ORIGIN IN AMERICA 
The discovery by Barghoorn et a/ (4) of fossil pollen 
in the Valley of Mexico seems now to have established 
the origin of corn in America beyond question but it 
still leaves open the problem of where in America maize 
was first domesticated. 
The fossil pollen also proves without doubt that wild 
maize once grew in the Valley of Mexico. But the fact 
that maize pollen was found in the drill core only at great 
depths (below 69 meters) and then was absent until it 
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