The Courtship of the Corn 237 



lovers have left home in search of the beloved. Only a very few 

 of that host are destined to find her. Nature knows full well 

 that the first duty of the artist is selection. As she was pre- 

 pared to create four female megaspores and to sacrifice three 

 of them, so she brings millions of pollen grains to maturity 

 only to let them float away on the summer wind, unfulfilled 

 and unused. Only a very small proportion of those borne by 

 the stamen find lodgment on the quivering silks. 



What sense tells the pollen grain that this thin, wavering, 

 green thread is the one sure route to his mate? Immediately, 

 on that first contact, the first of the two original nuclei in the 

 grain develops into a tube which runs down the corn silk, 

 six, even eight inches to the sac embryo to which the silk leads. 

 What a journey for a bit of an infinitesimal fleck which only 

 the keenest lens makes discernible! Odysseus and Ulysses were 

 stay-at-homes compared with this lover. Down that tube, as it 

 grows along the silk, travel the twin sperm nuclei which were 

 formed in the pollen grain. 



The Quiche Indians of Guatemala tell a tale of twin brothers 

 who made a journey into the Underworld, and there met 

 their deaths. One of them, though dead, caused the princess 

 of the Underworld to conceive. For a time she remained in 

 the Underworld, hiding her condition, but ultimately this 

 became known and she was cast out into the Upper World. 

 There she gave birth to twin sons.* 



Xquiq of the legend is the American Persephone. All Un- 

 derworld goddesses have a connection with fertility and with 

 grain. True to the universal pattern of the myth, Xquiq on 

 reaching the Upper World exerts amazing power over the 

 maize. Her twin sons work maize magic. 



Did those long-ago tale tellers among the Quiches have 

 the knowledge botanists have arrived at by scientific experi- 

 ments that not only is the embryo sac in the ear fertilized by 

 twin sperm nuclei, but the kernel of corn itself is actually 



* See Chapter XVIII, "Maize Magic in American Folklore." 



