MILLET. 117 



This variety is decidedly a native of India, where it 

 bears the name of congue. The plant is stronger, 

 the spike and the seed are larger, and to bring it to 

 maturity requires a warmer climate than suffices for 

 German millet. The use to which this grain is 

 brought in Tuscany, is that of feeding domestic fowls 

 and animals, including horses. The larger species 

 of animals are also fed upon the leaves and culms, of 

 which last-mentioned portion brushes are likewise 

 made. The Italians also make from the flour a kind 

 of bread, which is dark coloured and coarse. Like 

 those of maize, the seeds of both these varieties are 

 of various colours. 



PANICLED MILLET is the species most usually cul- 

 tivated. The commonest variety, which botanists 

 call Sorghum vulgare, is known by various names in 

 the different districts where it is grown. In India it 

 is called jovarce , in Egypt and Nubia dhourra ; 

 while in our West-Indian colonies it has received the 

 name of Guinea corn, either because the seed was 

 first conveyed thither from the western coast of 

 Africa, or as some persons have affirmed, because 

 of its extensive use in feeding the African negroes 

 throughout those colonies. The height to which this 

 plant attains varies according to the soil and culture. 

 In Egypt its growth seldom exceeds five or six feet, 

 while Burckhardt* speaks of the stalks of dhourra 

 as being sixteen or twenty feet long. The leaves 

 are thirty inches long, and two inches wide in the 

 broadest part. The flowers, when they first corue 

 out in large panicles at the top of the stalk, resemble 

 the male spikes of the maize plant. These flowers 

 are succeeded by roundish seeds, the colour of which 

 is, in some cases, a milky white, with a black umbilical 

 dot ; in others the seeds are red, but in both cases 

 they are wrapped round with the chaff, and are 



* Travels in Nubia, p. 280. 



