PLANTS CULTIVATED FOE THEIR SEEDS. 393 



after the discovery of America, and this very rapidity 

 completes the proof that, had it existed anywhere in Asia 

 or Africa, it would have played an important part in 

 agriculture for thousands of years. 



We shall see that the facts are quite contrary to these 

 in America. 



At the time of the discovery of the new continent, 

 maize was one of the staples of its agriculture, from the 

 La Plata valley to the United States. It had names in 

 all the languages. 1 The natives planted it round their 

 temporary dwellings where they did not form a fixed 

 population. The burial-mounds of the natives of North 

 America who preceded those of our day, the tombs of 

 the Incas, the catacombs of Peru, contain ears or grains of 

 maize, just as the monuments of ancient Egypt contain 

 grains of barley and wheat and millet-seed. In Mexico, 

 a goddess who bore a name derived from that of maize 

 (Cinteutl, from Cintli) answered to the Ceres of the 

 Greeks, for the first-fruits of the maize harvest were 

 offered to her, as the first-fruits of our cereals to the 

 Greek goddess. At Cusco the virgins of the sun offered 

 sacrifices of bread made from Indian corn. Nothing is 

 better calculated to show the antiquity and generality of 

 the cultivation of a plant than this intimate connection 

 with the religious rites of the ancient inhabitants. We 

 must not, however, attribute to these indications the 

 same importance in America as in the old world. The 

 civilization of the Peruvians under the Incas, and that of 

 the Toltecs and Aztecs in Mexico, has not the extra- 

 ordinary antiquity of the civilizations of China, Chaldea, 

 and Egypt. It dates at earliest from the beginning of the 

 Christian era; but the cultivation of maize is more 

 ancient than the monuments, to judge from the numerous 

 varieties of the species found in them, and their dispersal 

 into remote regions. 



A yet more remarkable proof of antiquity has been 

 discovered by Darwin. He found ears of Indian corn, 

 and eighteen species of shells of our epoch, buried in the 

 soil of the shore in Peru, now at least eighty-five feet 



1 See Martius, Beitr'dge zur Ethnographic AmeriJcas, p. 127. 



