52 AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY. 



lacryma Jobi, L.). This grain, which is dioecious and related to 

 maize, is found almost always near houses, in small moist beds. 

 Its white seeds, which are nearly globular and hard, are used, not 

 so much for food, as for making Buddhist rosaries, and even these 

 only exceptionally. I do not know whether the tear-grass is used 

 in Japan to make mats, as in Canton. (See Scherzer.) 



lo. Maize {Zea Mais, L.) is called T6-moro-koshi, T6-kibi, 

 Satsuma-kibi, and Nanban-kibi by the Japanese. Of the three 

 great gifts which the Kew World offered the Old in the sixteenth 

 century, tobacco was most joyfully received, and found the quickest 

 entrance and dissemination among the nations of the earth. Maize 

 followed it, and then the potato. This last did not begin its eastern 

 journey till late, and advanced slowly, only winning warm friends, 

 outside of Europe, among the Maoris of New Zealand. Maize, in its 

 half-ripe condition, on the cob, offered a ready food, quickly and 

 easily prepared by boiling or roasting, with a sweet taste, which is 

 more pleasing to the people of Africa and Asia than the stronger 

 flavour of our common potato. This explains its more rapid spread 

 in favourable climates. 



An additional reason is, that, with its various sub-species, it 

 accommodates itself within a wide zone to manifold conditions 

 of climate and soil, from the equator to latitude 50° in North 

 America, as in Europe, and to the fortieth parallel in the southern 

 hemisphere, — from the hot, damp shores of Eastern Mexico to the 

 plateau of Anahuac and the plain of Utah, where its cultivation is 

 only rendered possible by irrigation. 



Like rice, maize is a summer growth — more modest, it is true, 

 than the latter in its demands for warmth and moisture, but yet 

 more dependent upon them than are our European cereals. To 

 develop and ripen its grains, it requires a mean summer warmth 

 of at least 15° C. But to flourish, it must have also a bountiful 

 supply of water, natural or artificial, for its deep-growing roots. 

 Hence its cultivation is restricted — in the Mediterranean basin, 

 for example, almost entirely to its northern side, where, as in 

 the valley of the Po, there is no lack of rain in summer. On the 

 other hand, some of its sub-species, :with a short period of vegeta- 

 tion (three months, instead of five or six), reach in America quite 

 to the Red River of the North, the southern tributary of Lake 

 Winnipeg. The climate there is, I suppose, harder than that of 

 Northern Germany ; but with a greater rain-fall in the short, warm 

 summer, and an extremely fertile virgin soil, the development and 

 ripening of maize is sufficiently fostered, as is not the case in 

 Thuringia, say, under almost the same parallel. 



On the discovery of America, Columbus found maize, among 

 other things, cultivated in Hispaniola, and later by the Indians at 

 the various points on the mainland where he touched. The Carib 

 term Mahis was adopted and changed to maize. To this day 

 maize flourishes best in American soil, where, according to Alex- 



