286 
for it had already, by that time, developed more varieties and 
undergone greater improvement than in the period since Columbus. 
The Maya Indians were among the earliest to cultivate it in the 
highlands approximately between the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and 
latitude 22° 
Archeological investigation in the Pueblo Indian country of our 
Southwest tends to show that agriculture, by which the cultivation 
of corn from Mexico is chiefly meant, began somewhere between 
2000 and 1500 B.C. 
The Aztec form of the word teosinté is teocentli,* from teotl, 
deity, and centli, ear of dried corn, a name that to the ancient 
Mexicans signified its divine origin. The term maize is from the 
Arawak Indian language and was learned by Columbus in the 
island of Haiti, although in Spain the Peruvian name zara was at 
first used to designate it. 
We shall endeavor to picture briefly the conditions in our South- 
west at that remote time when corn was introduced and to show 
what effect on the Indian inhabitants its introduction had. 
Up to that early period the Indians did not live in settled com- 
munities, but, existing hand-to-mouth by gathering wild seeds, 
berries, roots, and the like, and eking out their precarious liveli- 
* The form teocentlt was used by early botanists. The plant now desig- 
nated by teosinté is Euchlaena mexicana Schrader (= Euchlaena luxurians 
Durieu & Ascherson). In a letter of October 7, 1929, to the editor, Mr. 
G. N. Collins, U. S. Department of Agriculture, writes as follows: 
“T am not at 2 esas that the ae ever oes the ete ene 
to plants ae the Sea aes na. The name te da: is now universally 
used as the sine name o Pate le s but not so ee a th 
natives of Mexi and reas ala. In thes Se yea or teocentli 
is auoies to rah a genus of large eee very distantly related to 
“The first application of the name teosimté to Euchlaena appears in con 
nection with the introduction of Euchlaena into Europe in 1869, when ‘tie 
re sae now soos Euchlaena seed was sent to France from Guatemala under 
thi w of the fact that Euchlaena has never since been found 
in Gus re anid “th at the name fteosinté is applied to Tripsacum in both 
Guatemala and Mexico I am inclined to believe it ve ough some error 
seed of Euchlaena from apes became substituted for Tripsacum seed 
sent from Guatemala. It is a rather ie ura ene. sea ee I hope will 
some day be unraveled by - careful botanic cal survey of the Santa Rosa 
region in Gilt mala from which the teosinté w 
“ All poe 5 shoul not be allowed to obscure the rae that Euchlaena, what- 
ever its ame, 1s the closest known relative of maize and intimately 
Or i its origin.’ 
