OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 159 



the season permitted. Their foliage and pubescence were in every 

 way as in ordinary field corn, the staminate tassels M'ith conspicuously 

 longer and more drooping racemes, the habit of growth wholly unusual. 

 In our ordinary form the erect culm is always apparently single, bear- 

 ing solitary axillary ears which are terminal upon a usually short leafy- 

 bracted peduncle. This peduncle is in fact a lateral branch, bearing a 

 terminal pistillate spike corresponding to the staminate panicle on the 

 main stem. In this Mexican corn, on the other hand, the better de- 

 veloped stalks were evidently branched from several of the axils, the 

 branches often becoming three or four feet in length, very leafy, and 

 having at least a rudimentary ear in the axil of every leaf. Several, 

 sometimes half a dozen, perfect ears were formed upon each branch. 

 The terminal ear was always androgynous, staminate at the summit. 

 On the shorter stems the branches were reduced to a more or less 

 crowded axillary cluster of §ars similar to the one received from Prof. 

 Duges. The last year's season was a long one, and there was no heavy 

 frost in Cambridge until near the end of October. The corn however 

 was at that time still very green, and the stalks were finally cut and 

 stored under shelter in the hope that the ears would ripen in the 

 stack; but upon very few did any of the kernels mature. 



The natural supposition was that we had here at last the original 

 wild state of our cultivated maize. A careful comparison of the two, 

 as thorough as the material at hand of the cultivated forms w^ould per- 

 mit, has led me first to doubt the probability of this, and now to con- 

 sider the form in question a distinct species. The differences upon 

 which this conclusion is based are in the habit of growth, the arrange- 

 ment of the staminate spikelets and the nervation of their glumes, the 

 form of the glumes of the pistillate flowers, and the ready disarticula- 

 tion of the rijjened ear. 



It appears from descriptions, figures, and such specimens as I have 

 seen of cultivated maize, that the staminate spikelets are in pairs at 

 the joints of the rhachis, and their empty glumes 7-9-nerved. In the 

 Mexican plant there are usually three and sometimes four together, 

 one of them short-pedicelled, the others more nearly sessile. The 

 empty glumes are 3-5-nerved and bicarinate, the flowering ones more 

 narrow than in Z. Mays. The pistillate spikelets are in pairs at the 

 joints of the rhachis, the intei nodes of which are more or less strongly 

 margined and cupulate, and finally become hard and shining. The 

 glumes are very broad, strongly concave and enfolding each other, 

 much more so than in the flowers of Z. Mays that I have examined, 

 and than they are represented in the figures of Nees and Doell. The 



