392 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



sents the plant. Dr. Hance^ appears to have based his 

 arguments upon the researches of Mayers, who says that 

 early Chinese authors assert that maize was imported 

 from Sifan (Lower Mongolia, to the west of China) long 

 before the end of the fifteenth century, at an unknown 

 date. The article contains a copy of the drawing in the 

 Pen-tsao-kung-mu, to which he assigns the date 1597. 



The importation through Mongolia is improbable to 

 such a degree that it is hardly worth speaking of it, and 

 as for the principal assertion of the Chinese author, the 

 dates are uncertain and late. The work was finished in 

 1578 according to Bonafous, in 1597 according to Mayers. 

 If this be true, and especially if the second of these dates 

 is the true one, it may be admitted that maize was brought 

 to China after the discovery of America. The Portuguese 

 came to Java in 1496,^ that is to say four years after the 

 discovery of America, and to China in 1516.^ Magellan's 

 voyage from South America to the Philippine Islands took 

 place in 1520. During the fifty-eight or seventy-seven 

 years between 1516 and the dates assigned to the Chinese 

 work, seeds of maize may have been taken to China by 

 navigators from America or from Europe. Dr. Bret- 

 schneider wrote to me recently that the Chinese did not 

 know the new world earlier than the Europeans, and that 

 the lands to the east of their country, to which there are 

 some allusions in their ancient writings, are the islands of 

 Japan. He had already Quoted the opinion of a Chinese 

 savant, that the introduction of maize in the neighbourhood 

 of Pekin dates from the last years of the Ming dynasty, 

 which ended in 1644. This date agrees with the other 

 facts. The introduction into Japan was probably of later 

 date, since Ksempfer makes no mention of the species.* 



From all these facts, we conclude that maize is not a 

 native of the old world. It became rapidly difiused in it 



^ The article is in the Pharmaceutical Journal of 1870 ; I only know 

 it from a short extract in Seemann's Journal of Botany, 1871, p. 62. 



2 Enmphius, Amhoin., vol. v. p. 525, 



3 Malte-Briin, Geographie, i. p. 493. 



^ A plant engraved on an ancient weapon which Siebold had taken 

 for maize is a sorghum, according to Eein, quoted by Wittmack, Uehsr 

 Antiken Mais. 



