396 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



of the early Maya peoples. Since this region embraces the maize 

 ancestors, the maize variabiUty, and had a people fully capable of 

 developing maize, it is sometliing better than an idle guess to place 

 the origin of maize within the territory now covered by the Mexican 

 State of Chiapas and the Guatemalan Department of Huehuetenango, 

 with the emphasis on the latter. On this view maize migrated south- 

 ward as well as northward, the movement southward possibly in 

 exchange for the pots of Peru. 



The present-day descendants of the Maya living in the region of 

 teosinte do not use the Aztec name for this plant, but have the Maya 

 name Salic or Salicim, the latter suggesting an affinity to the Maya 

 word for corn — ixim. Farther south in Guatemala the Aztec name 

 of this grass reappears in the Department of Jutiapa, but the Aztecs 

 are known to have controlled this region of Guatemala through a 

 route along the coast extending even into El Salvador as far as Santa 



Ana. 



THEORIES OF ORIGIN 



There are several theories current as to how maize may have been 

 derived from its existing American wild relatives. All of these 

 theories have their merits and no one of them offers a definite solu- 

 tion of the m3'^stery. To understand something of the difficulties 

 involved in the transition from the known wild relatives of maize 

 to the cultivated cereal it is essential to understand some of the 

 principal differences between corn and its relatives. 



The most familiar part of the corn plant is the ear which botanically 

 constitutes a conundrum and a monstrosity. No other grass pos- 

 sesses such a seed-bearing organ. Naturally, confronted with such 

 a fascinating problem as the origin of the ear of corn, botanists have 

 proposed several theories as to how this structure could have been 

 derived. These theories are not in agreement, and several of them, 

 though plausible, do not take into consideration all of the morpho- 

 logical facts. 



All authorities recognize that the ear of com is a transformed ter- 

 minal inflorescence of a lateral branch and that its covering of husks 

 came about through a shortening of the intemodes. The husks are 

 in reahty leaf sheaths that in some varieties, especially of sweet com, 

 still bear well-developed leaf blades and still retain buds in their axils. 

 Occasionally an ear stalk loses the brachytic features of its intemodes 

 and the result is an ear at the end of a vegetative branch (pi. 17, fig. 1). 

 Or at times the buds develop between the ear-bearing nodes and the 

 vegetative branches or suckers, in which case the resulting branches 

 are seen to be intermediate between ears and suckers. 



In the wild grass, teosinte, there is a bud in the axil of every leaf 

 except the uppermost, and well-grown plants have a herringbone 

 branch pattern with a branch in the axil of each leaf except the upper- 



