Early Corn Planters 15 



scribes in vivid detail the cataclysm which "in the year of 6 

 KAN, on the nth, Mulac, in the month Zac" approximately 

 3,500 years ago destroyed the Land of Mu and some 64,000,- 

 ooo of its inhabitants. 



Whether the Maya of Guatemala, where the oldest ruins 

 on the isthmus have been uncovered, were survivors of the 

 lost Land of Mu, or whether they arrived on the Pacific shore 

 long after Mu was a legend, matters little here. Survivors or 

 immigrants, they found growing on the highlands above the 

 Gulf of Tehuantepec that from which a new empire was to 

 grow. 



What they found were two grasses. Today these parents 

 of the maize have botanical names: euchlaena mexicana and 

 euchlaena luxurians. The latter is the parent whom the child 

 most resembles. The two are not found together, and native, 

 anywhere else in the world. Therefore, botanists agree that 

 the marriage between them, and the birth of their child, the 

 maize, could only have taken place in this particular section 

 of the western hemisphere. 



Here, then, on the west coast of Mexico, in the temperate 

 highlands above the Pacific, our corn was born. And here, 

 with the first corn, the glory, the power and the fabled wisdom 

 of the Maya had their beginning. 



Was the cross-fertilization which produced the grain ac- 

 complished by accident of wind and insect? Or did man have 

 a hand in it? It may be that some wandering hunter remem- 

 bered the sweet taste of bread eaten in Mu or in some land 

 west of the Pacific. Perhaps he remembered that that bread 

 had been made of meal ground from millet seeds. Teased by 

 these memories, prompted by the stirrings of genius, he may 

 have experimented with the pollen of the two tasseled grasses 

 which he found growing on the Cordilleras. Intent or acci- 

 dent? At this distance, what does it matter? One man, how- 

 ever ignorantly, served Nature. One man scratched a hole in 

 the red earth, dropped into it a few of the seeds he had 

 mated, and waited for results. One man measured the height 



