3826 MEETING OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
months to do so. The Hindus, however, are not content with terms 
for such broad distinctions as might be derived from these obvious 
sources, but have names for varieties, the distinctions between which 
are unappreciable by Europeans. In the north-western provinces of 
India, no fewer than sixty-six of these names have been enumerated ; 
and in Bengal, of which rice is nearly the sole bread-corn, the number 
is said to be still greater. But, besides terms for this corn, founded 
on variety, on season, and on mode of culture, the grain itself bears 
one name in the straw, another when threshed, one name when in the 
husk and another when freed from it, and a fifth when cooked. A 
similar redundance of terms is found in the languages of the Malay 
and Philippine Islands. Such minute nomenclatures seem to point to 
a great antiquity in the culture of this cereal with the people among 
whom they obtain. 
Maize is, beyond all question, a native of America, and before 
the discovery of the New World was wholly unknown to the Old. 
The name as known to European nations is taken directly from the 
Spanish, and it is to be presumed that the conquerors of the New 
World borrowed it from one of the many languages of that continent. 
In some of the Oriental languages we have specific names for it, which 
seem entirely native,—such as bhutta in Hindi, jagyng in most of the 
languages of the Indian Archipelago, fatsalva in the Madagascan. 
This would lead to the belief that the plant was indigenous where such 
names were given to it, but the probability is that they were taken 
from some native plant bearing a resemblance to maize. Thus, in the 
two principal languages of Southern India, maize is named after the 
chief millet cultivated in the peninsula, the cholu or ragi (Cynosurus 
^ Coracanus), to which an epithet implying its foreign origin is added. 
The Turks give it the name of boghdai Misr, or the wheat of Egypt, 
which is not more amiss than the names given by the French and 
English when they call it Indian and Turkey corn. 
Philologieal evidence applied to plants yielding starch, or esculent 
farina, affords somewhat more satisfactory evidence than in the case of 
the cereals. One of the most important of the plants yielding this 
farina is the genus Dioscorea, in our language the Yam, and of which a 
dozen species, independent of varieties, have been enumerated. They 
are natives of Asia, Africa, and America, but of their tropical and sub- 
tropical parts only.- The Spanish and Portuguese name of the 
