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Office of Seed and Plant Introduction a new discovery, Zea giuitemal- 

 ensis, which seems to be ordinary corn from Guatemala. Besides these 

 we have a Zca Mays chinensis and a Zea Mays pensylvanica, and in this 

 way we might continue until we run out of habitats and combinations of 

 characteristics. Gernert's Branch Corn was hailed as a new seventh 

 species, Zea ramosa. Emerson might have named his liguleless variety 

 Zea Mays aligulata and his dwarf variety Zea Mays jjygmea-androgyna, 

 and Stewart or the writer might, on discovering the two-flowered condi- 

 tion of the female spikelets of Country Gentleman sweet corn, have rev- 

 eled in the invention of some such name as Zea Mays saccharata gem- 

 inata — but none of us did. The difficulty is not in finding new varieties 

 or in naming those found, but in avoiding being led to more ridiculous 

 ends — in stopping the naming pi'ocess soon enough to permit a name to 

 mean anything; for when anyone has made a complete list of all the vari- 

 eties that he knows, someone else can always add a few more that he 

 knows, or, if need be, make a few to order by judicious hybridization. 



The cause of this confusion is easier to find than is its remedy. It 

 lies in our limited knowledge of the evolutionary history of the plant. 

 No wild form of corn has ever been seen by civilized man. When Amer- 

 ica was discovered, the plant cultivated by the Indians was almost as 

 complex as it is today. We can, however, imagine the evolutionary 

 process reaching a place where its product was a plant of more or less 

 uniform character agreeing with the generic description of Zea. Further 

 evolution, aided by reversion, then proceeded to produce in isolated envir- 

 onments a number of varieties possessing in definite combinations tho 

 various characteristics already mentioned. If we knew what these com- 

 binations were, we should have a basis for naming varieties. But the 

 plant readily hybridizes with other varieties of its kind, and these diff"er- 

 ent original types, brought together and mixed by the savage or semi- 

 civilized agriculturist, gave us the heterogenous combination that we 

 know corn to be. It is probably safe to say that there exists nowhere 

 in the world today a primary variety of corn that has not been com- 

 plicated by hybridization with some other variety. Hybridization with 

 teosinte, one of the nearest relatives of maize, has added further difficul- 

 ties in the tropics, and it is probably due to the limited habitat of teosinte 

 as compared with that of maize, that the dividing line between the two 

 genera has not long ago been obliterated. Few other plants, wild or cul - 



