Corn-Makers 229 



soaked in warm water several hours and then laid in a special 

 box, like a cradle. After five to seven days the kernels will have 

 sprouted, indicating the fertility of the ears from which they 

 were chosen. 



These corn mothers have brought prosperity to numberless 

 farms. Not many years ago a professional man in a western 

 manufacturing town withdrew his capital from stocks and 

 bonds and bought a corn farm in one of the Ohio valleys. He 

 himself was no farmer. He engaged a superintendent at a 

 salary of five thousand dollars a year. Even after meeting this 

 and all other expenses, he found his capital paid him a better 

 rate of interest than the preferred stocks and guaranteed mort- 

 gages had done. And it was the rag doll which assured him 

 his yearly dividends. Rag dolls and hybrid corn the latest 

 achievement of the corn-makers are making fortunes in the 

 corn belt. 



The story of hybrid corn begins in the cloister of the 

 Augustinian monastery at Brno, Moravia. Today that cloister 

 is quiet and deserted. The monks have departed, and only a 

 few old couples who lease the tiny houses which form the 

 cloister for a tiny rental cultivate the little walled gardens 

 where formerly the brothers grew their own vegetables accord- 

 ing to the rules of the order. 



About the middle of the last century, German, Austrian 

 and Czech immigrants began coming to the farmlands in the 

 American corn belt. Those pioneers who built their sod huts 

 and battled stoically against drought, grasshoppers, blizzards, 

 cyclones, loneliness and the tumbleweed, never knew that in 

 the land they had left, a priest son of a poor peasant was 

 making experiments in plant heredity which would ultimately 

 make their grandchildren rich. 



Johann Mendel Father Gregor as he was called in religion 

 was too delicate in health to be a farmer. Poverty and the 

 rigid Austrian caste system might have kept him from get- 

 ting the education he ardently craved had not the Church 



