The Courtship of the Corn 239 



a solution of one of the botanical mysteries. It has found the 

 origin of the American corn. 



The origin of zea mays has been explained by various bot- 

 anists in various ways. Some authorities believed that the corn 

 as we know it developed from a primitive corn very similar 

 to the present cultivated varieties. Others believed that zea 

 mays traced its descent from euchlaena mexicana, the wild 

 grass which the Mexicans call teosinte (gods' grass). Still 

 others played with the idea of a possible relationship between 

 the maize and tripsacum, another wild grass of the Guatemalan 

 highlands. 



About the middle of the eighteenth century, the Chevalier 

 Lorenzo Boturini Benducci, an Italian nobleman whom Dr. 

 Borrull of Salamanca called "an ornament of all sciences and 

 a stranger to none/' went botanizing in Central America. He 

 reported: 



I found in New Spain a wild maize that grows amidst forest or 

 woods with a small ear whose few grains were more delicate in 

 flavor than the cultivated kind. 



This sentence of the Chevalier's acted on botanists like a 

 pirates' map on treasure-seekers. Again and again, through the 

 two centuries since he wrote them, men have gone into the 

 highlands of Guatemala seeking the wild maize which might 

 solve the mystery of the origin of our American corn. Within 

 the past decade, Oliver La Farge started up the quest again 

 by a statement that at a village between Menton and Chacula, 

 at an altitude of five to six thousand feet, he ate young corn 

 ears two inches long, "like oat sheaves without the whiskers." 

 He added that in the same district there grew "a tall grass 

 like silage corn run to seed, the ears and tassel of which were 

 edible and were green in rainy weather. This," he concluded, 

 "may be the maize Boturini described." 



While various eager botanists like Dr. Wilson Popenoe 

 of Guatemala City were combing the country for clues which 

 might solve the mystery, in the Texas Agricultural Experiment 



