252 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 
in many species, we feel confident that we must refer the origin 
of our sorghums to the dark continent,! whence they spread first 
to Egypt and afterward east, north, and west. 
Sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum). This remarkable sugar- 
bearing plant is only remotely related to the Sorghums. It is 
cultivated to-day in all the equatorial regions of the earth, for 
its sugar is a universal favorite, though it is of but compara- 
tively recent introduction. 
Its most ancient names are Sanskrit? (ikshu or ikshava). All 
of its nearest related species grow wild in southeastern India, 
the Malay Peninsula, and the outlying islands. Both these facts 
indicate the origin to have been in Cochin China or thereabouts, 
from which it spread first west with the India trade and after- 
wards to China, where it appeared not much, if any, before the 
time of Christ.2 The Greeks and Romans had heard of it as 
calamus. YVhe Hebrews were unacquainted with sugar, and to 
them honey and the honeycomb were symbols of sweetness. 
The Arabs introduced it into Spain, and from thence it made 
its way to the West India islands (St. Domingo, 1520, and 
Guadeloupe, 1644) and soon after became rapidly abundant. 
Millet. This is a popular name for a great variety of useful 
plants. First of all, it is often erroneously applied to the Asi- 
atic cultivations of the various nonsaccharine sorghums already 
mentioned. 
Again it is applied to the pearl or cat-tail millet (Pennisetum 
typhoideum), to the foxtail millet (Setarda ztalica, the Panicum 
1 The writer saw growing freely in Brazil what would be taken anywhere to 
be a broom corn with an inferior brush. I had no means of tracing its habitat, 
but from the fact that broom corn was not only not cultivated in the neighbor- 
hood, but brooms themselves were unknown, it had every semblance of being 
indigenous. Granting even that to be true, we could not look upon South 
America as the original source of broom corn because it was known in Egypt 
before the discovery of this country. 
2“ Origin of Cultivated Plants,” p. 157. 
8 The older Chinese writings are said to make no mention of it, which is 
significant, because the universal appetite for sweets made it a favorite at once 
upon acquaintance. 
