50 



The World's Commercial Products 



PRIMITIVE BUFFALO PLOUGH 



MAIZE 

 OR INDIAN CORN 



This valuable food-stuff is the 

 grain of a gigantic grass known 

 to botanists as Zea Mays. 

 The origin of the plant is 

 wrapped in mystery, and has 

 given rise to considerable dis- 

 cussion, the question at issue 

 being whether Zea is a native 

 of the Old World or of the 

 New. In his comprehensive 

 monograph of the plant the 

 great French agriculturist, 

 Bonafous, upheld the theory 

 of an Asiatic origin, but his opinion was contested by De Candolle, who considered the evidence 

 upon which an Eastern origin of the plant was based to be quite insufficient and to a certain 

 extent misleading, and further stated that the true home of maize was America, and that the 

 plant was only known in Europe after the discovery of the New World. There can be little 

 doubt that the bulk of the evidence is in favour of De Candolle's view, for while it is impossible 

 to find any traces of the plant in the Old World before the fifteenth century, either in actual 

 remains or in historical records, there are, on the other hand, indisputable proofs of its great 

 antiquity in the American continent. Soon after the discovery of America, travellers found 

 the grain in the ancient tombs of the Incas, and although the civilisation of the Sons of the Sun 

 probably does not date back previous to the Christian era, the fact indicates that maize was 

 even at that ■■ remote period a recognised food grain. A yet more remarkable proof of the 

 antiquity of the cereal in America is afforded by the discovery by Darwin of ears of maize 

 buried in the soil of the shore in Peru to a depth of eighty -five feet, and this fact taken in con- 

 junction with the absence of any well-authenticated reference to the cereal in Europe, Asia, or 

 Africa previous to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, leads one to regard the American origin of 

 the plant as a fact beyond dispute. Once introduced into the Old World, however, maize very 

 rapidly became known to the inhabitants of all countries where the climatic conditions 

 allowed of its cultivation, and the cereal received a variety of names. To the British 

 people it is most familiarly known as maize or Indian corn ; to the American, merely as 

 corn ; in Holland and Hungary it is called Turkish wheat ; in central France, Spanish corn ; 

 in Turkey, Egyptian corn ; in Egypt, Syrian dhurra ; and in the South African colonies, 

 mealies. The widespread cultivation of the plant is a convincing proof of its value as a 

 food-stuff, but it is only in a few countries that the cultivation of maize can be regarded as 

 an industry of first-class 

 importance. In Europe the 

 principal maize - growing 

 countries are Hungary, Italy, 

 Spain, and the South of 

 France. In Italy maize is a 

 most important food of the 

 people ; everyone eats his 

 daily portion of " polenta," 

 a kind of porridge prepared 

 from the coarsely ground 

 grains, the poorer classes 



BREAKING UP THE SOIL WITH THE HELP OF BUFFALOES 



