MONOCOTYLEDONS 269 
and the crop matures in about five months. The great 
corn-producing States in their order are Illinois, lowa, Kan- 
sas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Indiana; and in 1899 these 
States produced nearly three-fifths of the entire crop of the 
United States. 
Aside from its use as a food for man and domestic 
animals, corn, it is said, enters into the preparation of 
more than a hundred different articles, in which the husks, 
the outer part of the stalk, the pith, and the cobs are used. 
Most of the starch of the United States comes from corn, 
and much of the whisky and the alco- 
hol. In addition to the various races 
of field corn, the sugar-containing sweet 
corn, used in marketing and canning, 
with its wrinkled grains and short grow- 
ing period, is well known; and also the 
small-eared and flinty pop-corn. 
While corn is not seriously injured 
by rusts (§ 84) as are the other cere- 
als, its most common disease is smut, 
which appears as tumor-like swellings 
(on stalks, leaves, and ears) full of 
spores that look like black powder. 
Smuts are related to the rusts, and 
their attack on corn has not been pre- 
vented so successfully as have their 
attacks on other cereals. 
Rice.—Rice is said to form the prin- 
cipal food of one-half the human race 
(Fig. 266). A native of the East Indies, 
it is cultivated now wherever the proper 
conditions are present. It needs a sub-  [ts. 266.—Rice.— 
ks z After WossIpLo. 
tropical climate, and a moist soil that 
ean be flooded artificially at certain seasons. Far the 
greatest amount of the rice of the world is produced in 
