I 

 Early Corn Planters 



CORN, in the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the 

 translators of the King James Bible, means loosely, any 

 sort of edible grain. It conveys no exact meaning that a 

 botanist can analyze. To the primitive Saxons who devised 

 the word, and took it with them from the shores of the 

 Baltic to England, it probably stood for wild barley, or for 

 the split wheat which was the "corn" for which Israel sent 

 his sons to Egypt. Split wheat and barley were the grains 

 known to the early Europeans. 



Language knows no accidents. It was not by slip of tongue 

 that "corn" became the common English name for the yellow 

 kernels which the Spaniards had called for a century by the 

 Haitian name mahiz. To those gentlemen of Devon who 

 sailed with Sir Richard Grenville to the Plantations in Virginia, 

 to Drake's seamen, ready to mutiny on account of moldy 

 bread and maggoty beef, the green maize fields that spread 

 around every Indian village in the New World meant salvation 

 from scurvy and famine, renewed bodily strength, and renewed 

 faith in the emprise which had brought them across the 

 Atlantic. All this they expressed when they called the maize 

 by that satisfying round monosyllable which had represented 

 bread and life to their Saxon forebears: Korn. 



Long before the first white men came to the Americas, 

 maize was known to and grown by all the Indian tribes between 

 the St. Lawrence and Lake Titicaca. Each tribe had its own 

 name for it. Though phonetically different, all these names 

 carried one signifiance. Whether spoken by Inca, Aztec, Creek, 

 Sioux, Crow, Mohawk, Iroquois or Algonquin, the name for 



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