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[1981] 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 important 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 monuments present no specimen or drawing of it.[1982] Rifaud, it is true, found an ear of maize in a sarcophagus at Thebes, 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 all monuments, and would have been connected with religious ideas like all other remarkable plants. A species so easy of cultivation would have spread into all 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,[1983] at the end of the eighteenth century, mentioned maize as still but little grown in Egypt, where it had no name distinct from the sorghums. Ebn Baithar, an Arab physician of the thirteenth century, who had travelled through the countries lying between Spain and Persia, indicates no plant which can be supposed to be maize.
J. Crawfurd,[1984] having seen maize generally cultivated in the Malay Archipelago under a name jarung, which appears to be indigenous, believed that the species was a native of these islands. But then how is it Rumphius makes no mention of it. The silence of this author points to an introduction later than the seventeenth century. Maize was so little diffused on the continent of India in the last century, that Roxburgh[1985] wrote in his flora, which was published long after it was drawn up, “Cultivated in different parts of India in gardens, and only as an ornament, but nowhere on the continent of India as an object of cultivation on a large scale.” We have seen that there is no Sanskrit name.
Maize is frequently cultivated in China in modern times, and particularly round Pekin for several generations,[1986] although most travellers of the last century make no mention of it. Dr. Bretschneider, in his work published in 1870, does not hesitate to say that maize is not indigenous in China; but some words in his letter of 1881 make me think that he now attributes some importance to an ancient Chinese author, of whom Bonafous and afterwards Hance and Mayers have said a great deal. This is a work by Li-chi-tchin, entitled Phen-thsao-kang-mou, or Pên-tsao-kung-mu, a species of treatise on natural history, which Bretschneider[1987] says was written at the end of the sixteenth century. Bonafous says it was concluded in 1578, and the edition which he had seen in the Huzard library was of 1637. It contains a drawing of maize with the Chinese character. This plate is copied in Bonafous’ work, at the beginning of the chapter on the original country of the maize. It is clear that it represents the plant. Dr. Hance[1988] appears to have based his arguments upon the researches of Mayers, who says that early Chinese authors assert that maize was imported from Sifan (Lower Mongolia, to the west of China) long before the end of the fifteenth century, at an unknown date. The article contains a copy of the drawing in the Pên-tsao-kung-mu, to which he assigns the date 1597.
The importation through Mongolia is improbable to such a degree that it is hardly worth speaking of it, and as for the principal assertion of the Chinese author, the dates are uncertain and late. The work was finished in 1578 according to Bonafous, in 1597 according to Mayers. If this be true, and especially if the second of these dates is the true one, it may be admitted that maize was brought to China after the discovery of America. The Portuguese came to Java in 1496,[1989] that is to say four years after the discovery of America, and to China in 1516.[1990] Magellan’s voyage from South America to the Philippine Islands took place in 1520. During the fifty-eight or seventy-seven years between 1516 and the dates assigned to the Chinese work, seeds of maize may have been taken to China by navigators from America or from Europe. Dr. Bretschneider wrote to me recently that the Chinese did not know the new world earlier than the Europeans, and that the lands to the east of their country, to which there are some allusions in their ancient writings, are the islands of Japan. He had already quoted the opinion of a Chinese savant, that the introduction of maize in the neighbourhood of Pekin dates from the last years of the Ming dynasty, which ended in 1644. This date agrees with the other facts. The introduction into Japan was probably of later date, since Kæmpfer makes no mention of the species.[1991]
From all these facts, we conclude that maize is not a native of the old world. It became rapidly diffused in it after the discovery of America, and this very rapidity completes the proof that, had it existed anywhere in Asia or Africa, it would have played an important part in agriculture for thousands of years.
We shall see that the facts are quite contrary to these in America.
At the time of the discovery of the new continent, maize was one of the staples of its agriculture, from the La Plata valley to the United States. It had names in all the languages.[1992] The natives planted it round their temporary dwellings where they did not form a fixed population. The burial-mounds of the natives of North America who preceded those of our day, the tombs of the Incas, the catacombs of Peru, contain ears or grains of maize, just as the monuments of ancient Egypt contain grains of barley and wheat and millet-seed. In Mexico, a goddess who bore a name derived from that of maize (Cinteutl, from Cintli) answered to the Ceres of the Greeks, for the first-fruits of the maize harvest were offered to her, as the first-fruits of our cereals to the Greek goddess. At Cusco the virgins of the sun offered sacrifices of bread made from Indian corn. Nothing is better calculated to show the antiquity and generality of the cultivation of a plant than this intimate connection with the religious rites of the ancient inhabitants. We must not, however, attribute to these indications the same importance in America as in the old world. The civilization of the Peruvians under the Incas, and that of the Toltecs and Aztecs in Mexico, has not the extraordinary antiquity of the civilizations of China, Chaldea, and Egypt. It dates at earliest from the beginning of the Christian era; but the cultivation of maize is more ancient than the monuments, to judge from the numerous varieties of the species found in them, and their dispersal into remote regions.
A yet more remarkable proof of antiquity has been discovered by Darwin. He found ears of Indian corn, and eighteen species of shells of our epoch, buried in the soil of the shore in Peru, now at least eighty-five feet above the level of the sea.[1993] This maize was perhaps not cultivated, but in this case it would be yet more interesting, as an indication of the origin of the species.
Although America has been explored by a great number of botanists, none have found maize in the conditions of a wild plant.