284 
potatoes and peanuts amounted respectively to more than $280,- 
000,000 and $56,000,000, not to mention the other crops. Indeed 
more than a third of the value of all the products raised on the 
farms of the United States was derived from plants that came to 
us originally from the Red Man. No one therefore can say that 
a considerable part of the agricultural wealth of the greatest agri- 
cultural country of the world has not been directly due to these 
First Families of America. We adopted, as something entirely 
new, numerous foods which to the Indians were an old, old story; 
and we likewise took over bodily many of their methods of pre- 
paring foods, as well as the very names by which they were known 
to them, such as maize itself, hominy, pone, succotash, samp, pem- 
mican, chocolate, tapioca, squash, tomato, and many more that are 
better known in other parts of the New World, such as aguacate, 
the Aztec ahuacatl (Avocado: Persea gratissima), more popularly 
known as alligator pear. We merely imitate the Indian whenever 
we extract the oil from sunflower-seeds, or the sap from the sugar- 
maple and boil it into toothsome syrup or sugar—except that, be- 
ing less soulful, we do not offer a sacrifice to the spirit of the tree 
and apologize for robbing it of its life-blood. 
We need not dwell here on the various useful vegetal products 
which likewise have been derived from the Indians but which are 
not used as food, such as cocaine, quinine, stramonium (from the 
divine Datura Stramonium), tobacco, and rubber. For the In- 
dians of tropical and semi-tropical America played ball, with 
rubber balls, many centuries before our baseball leagues were 
dreamed of. 
The Origin and Migration of Maize 
The botanical origin of Indian corn or maize is unknown. It 
has not been found growing wild within historic times, but is be- 
lieved to have originated somewhere between southern Mexico and 
Bolivia, since that region is the natural habitat of teosinté (Fig. 2), 
a coarse, succulent, annual grass and the nearest wild relative of 
Indian corn. Collins (Journal, Washington Academy of Science, 
2: 520, 1912) thinks it likely that maize originated as a hybrid 
between teosinté and some unknown and probably extinct species 
“not unlike the earless varieties of pod corn (Zea tunicata).” 
