MAIZE— KEMPTON 



387 



In our country before our agricultural antecedents were swamped 

 by the industrial era, the corn plant had begun to find its place in the 

 decorative arts. Benjamin Latrobe, who had so much to do with the 

 building of the Nation's Capitol, made use of ears of corn in a design 

 for column capitals used in that structure at the entrance to the old 

 Supreme Court library (pi. 2). These capitals are the oldest known 

 replicas of maize wrought by Europeans. They have stood in their 

 present location since their installation, having survived the burning 

 of the Capitol by the British. Most of the other adornments of the 

 Capitol have been shifted around, altered, or rebuilt, but these corn 

 columns, like the living plant in our civilization, have remained perma- 

 nent. Our southern planters, too, carried their devotion to agriculture 



FiGUEE 1. — Formalized com plants in ancient pottery decoration: a design on a clay vessel from the Vallo 

 de Chicama, Peru. (Copy by Lehmann.) 



with them when they built their town residences, and several styles 

 of attractive iron corn fences still enclose some of the gardens in New 

 Orleans (pi. 3). 



At the present time with the shift of our population from the farms 

 to the cities, the close connection between corn and our prosperity 

 is not appreciated. Indeed, many persons have only a vague idea of 

 just what a corn plant looks like (pi. 4). Yet we are today very much 

 of a corn civilization, with an annual per capita consumption of ap- 

 proximately 16 bushels. The agricultural Indians subsisting prin- 

 cipally on corn — so much so that in some places this gi'ain comprises 

 85 percent of the diet — do not consume more. It is true, corn does not 

 enter directly so completely into our diet as it does that of the Central 

 American Indians, but it is an important part of our economy. 



Aside from its materialistic value, maize has also become important 

 to our intellectual development, for this plant has proved to be 

 almost uniquely fitted for determining the facts of heredity. Students 



