THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 297 



vesture and varied adornment, that they are the gift of 

 the Gods, that these taught men to cultivate corn. 



The personification of physical forces and processes, of 

 light, heat, rain, of the floods of the Nile, may have 

 become, in many ways, mingled and united with the 

 worship of the individual personalities which first sought 

 to turn to account the treasures of Nature, in a wider 

 circle, for the profit of mankind. A striking phenomenon, 

 which indicates the enormous antiquity of the culture of 

 the Cerealia, is, that in spite of many most profound inves- 

 tigations, we have not yet succeeded in discovering the 

 proper native country of the more important kinds of Corn. 

 Not one of the industriously inquiring travellers in America 

 has ever met there with Maize otherwise than cultivated, 

 or as evidently an outcast from culture. With regard to 

 our European kinds of Corn, we have only very inac- 

 curate indications, that they have been found wild, here 

 and there, in the south-western countries of Central Asia. 

 But history proves that those regions formerly supported 

 so large a population, and that so high a condition of 

 culture there existed, that the assumption can scarcely be 

 justified, that those Corn-plants now found there, are 

 anything but descendants from plants which have escaped 

 from cultivation. From our knowledge of the great 

 eastern portion of China, we know that a dense popu- 

 lation can, by a certain degree of industrial culture, succeed 

 in extirpating every wild plant, and in clothing the land 

 exclusively with vegetables intentionally raised. Except 

 some few water-plants, in the purposely flooded Rice-fields, 

 the Botanist finds scarcely any plant, in the Chinese 

 plains, which is not an object of cultivation. So it may 

 not be at all impossible, that the Cerealia, perhaps 

 originally, as is the case now with so many Australian 



