The Plant's Response 



181 



ity, in gladness and beauty, to meet the best we have of 

 appreciation, longing, hoping; better than the fruits we 

 might consume the fruits that perish in the using. 



Nor shall we here forget the attainments of the men 

 of this western world. For men they were, though Span- 

 iard and Englishman alike destroyed them. To the 

 primitive men of America the world owes the education 

 of maize; and the wealth of Iowa and Illinois is at this 

 moment the response of a simple plant to the gentle 

 ministrations of the poor races who shaped the bowls 

 and heaped the mounds from Canada to Peru. Colum- 

 bus received mahiz from the poor brown people of San 

 Salvador, small ears of Indian corn, ears no bigger than 

 your fingers, but maize; and every school-boy knows 

 how the Puritan found the New England races tilling 

 the same wonderful plant. The great ears that now en- 

 rich our fields are the response to the careful tillage and 

 selection of our Illinois farmers through a hundred 

 years. Tschudi reports two varieties of maize taken 

 from Peruvian tombs earlier than the tombs of any of 

 the Ineas, and Mr. Darwin found "on the coast of Peru 

 heads of maize with eighteen species of recent sea-shell 

 imbedded in a beach which had been raised at least eigh- 

 ty-five feet above the present level of the sea." Mr. 

 Darwin gives this as evidence of far greater antiquity. 

 Who can tell who first "began to pluck the ears of corn 

 and to eat." 



But there are a thousand other plants, whose origin 

 is less obscure, whose response to the call of man has been 

 no less significant. All our garden vegetables may be 

 cited here : but one in particular may be taken to illus- 



