MAIZE—WHEAT. 381 
plant. The ear is eaten raw or boiled. The grain 
when beaten affords a nutritive bread called arepa, 
and the meal is employed in making soups or gruels, 
which are mixed with sugar, honey, and sometimes 
even pounded potatoes. Many kinds of drink are also 
prepared from it, some resembling beer, others cider. 
In the valley of Tolucca the stalks are squeezed be- 
tween cylinders, and from the fermented juice a spi- 
ritous liquor, called pulque de mahis, is procured. 
In favourable years Mexico yields a much larger 
quantity than is necessary for its own consumption ; 
but as this grain affords less nutritive substance in 
proportion to its bulk than the corn of Europe, and 
as the roads are generally difficult, obstacles are pre- 
sented to its transportation, which, however, will 
diminish when the country is more improved. 
We come now to the cereal plants which have been 
conveyed from the Old to the New Continent. A 
negro slave of Cortes found among the rice, which 
served to maintain the Spanish army, three or four 
particles of wheat, which were sown, we may suppose, 
before the year 1500. A Spanish lady, Maria d’Es- 
eobar, carried a few grains to Lima, and their pro- 
duce was distributed for three years among the new 
colonists, each receiving twenty or thirty seeds. At 
Quito the first European corn was sown near the 
convent of St Francis by Father Jose Rixi, a native 
of Flanders, and the monks still show, as a precious 
relic, the earthen vessel in which the original wheat 
eame from Europe. “‘ Why,” asks our author, “have 
not men preserved every where the names of those 
who, in place of ravaging the earth, have enriched 
it with plants useful to the human race?” 
The temperate region appears most favourable to 
the cultivation of the cerealia, or nutritive grasses 
