390 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



year 1500 maize had been sent to Seville for cultivation. 

 This iact, attested by F^e, who has seen the municipal 

 records,^ clearly shows the American origin, which caused 

 Hernandez to think the name of Turkish wheat a very 

 bad one. 



It may perhaps be urged that maize, new to Europe 

 in the sixteenth century, existed in some parts of Asia or 

 Africa before the discovery of America. Let us see what 

 truth there may be in this. 



The famous orientalist D'Herbelot^ had accumulated 

 several errors pointed out by Bonafous and by me, on 

 the subject of a passage in the Persian historian Mirkoud 

 of the fifteenth century, about a cereal which Rous, son 

 of Japhet, sowed upon the shores of the Caspian Sea, and 

 which he takes to be the Indian corn of our day. It is 

 hardly worth considering these assertions of a scholar to 

 whom it had never occurred to consult the works of the 

 botanists of his own day, or earlier. What is more im- 

 portant is the total silence on the subject of maize of the 

 travellers who visited Asia and Africa before the discovery 

 of America; also the absence of Hebrew and Sanskrit 

 names for this plant ; and lastly, that Egyptian monu- 

 ments present no specimen or drawing of it.* Rifaud, it 

 is true, found an ear of maize in a sarcophagus at Thebes, 

 I but it is believed to have been the trick of an Arab 

 ' impostor. If maize had existed in ancient Egypt, it would 

 be seen in aU monuments, and would have been connected 

 with religious ideas like all other remarkable plants. A 

 species so easy of cultivation would have spread into aU 

 neighbouring countries. Its cultivation would not have 

 been abandoned; and we find, on the contrary, that Prosper 

 Alpin, visiting Egypt in 1592, does not speak of it, and 

 that Forskal,* at the end of the eighteenth century, men- 

 tioned maize as still but little grown in Egypt, where it 

 had no name distinct from the sorghums. Ebn Baithar, 



' Ffe, Souvenirs de la Ouerre d'Espagne, p. 128. 



' BihliotMque Orientale, Paris, 1697, at the word Rou3. 



' Kunth, Ann. Sc. Nat., s^r. 1, toI. viii. p. 418 ; Kaspail, ihid. ; Unger, 

 PJlamen des Alien JSgyptens ; A. Braun, Pflanzenreste JEgypt. Mus. in 

 Berlin; Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians. 



* Forskal, p. liii. 



