The grass family furnishes this second most important cereal to all Americans and Europeans, although among inhabitants of tropical regions rice is perhaps more important than either wheat or corn. With the discovery of America the early travelers found the North American Indians, the Mexicans, and the Peruvians all growing corn and using it on a considerable scale. It must have been grown for hundreds of years before that time, as its wide distribution and many varieties testified even at that date. Its true home nor its actual wild ancestor has never been certainly determined, but a wild plant very closely related to our modern corn is found in the northern part of South America, and either there or in Central America is apparently the ancient home of corn. So much had corn entered into the life of the early Mexicans that the first Europeans to visit that country found the Mexicans making elaborate religious offerings to their corn goddess. And, as in Egypt, the tombs of the Incas of Peru contain seeds of the cereal most prized, which in the case of corn consists of several varieties. While their civilization is not as old as certain Old World races, the cultivation of corn must date back to the very beginnings of the Christian era. It is now spread throughout the world in warm regions, and as early as 1597 it was grown in China, a fact that led to the erroneous notion that China was its true home. Perhaps no fact is more conclusive as to its American origin than that corn belongs to a genus Zea, which contains only the single species mays, with perhaps one or two varieties, and that until the discovery of America Zea mays or Indian corn was unknown either as a wild or cultivated plant. Such an important cereal, if it actually were wild in the Old World, would have spread thousands of years ago as wheat did, and Columbus and his adventurous successors would not have brought from the New World a food that has since become second only to wheat.
Field corn of several different sorts, pop corn, and sweet corn were all developed by the Indians from the ancient stock, but comparatively recently the juice of the stem has been used for making corn sirup. The use of the leaves for cattle feed is known to all farmers, and from its solid stems it is now likely that some fiber good for paper making will be extracted.
RICE
Both wheat and corn are grasses that are cultivated in ordinary farm soils, but rice is derived from a grass that is nearly always grown for part of its life in water. It is taller than wheat, but not so tall as corn, and its wild home is in the tropical parts of southeastern Asia. It is still grown there in greatest quantity, and in the Philippines, while only a small part of the world’s supply comes from the New World. There are perhaps more people that rely upon rice for food than upon wheat and corn combined. It still is the principal article of diet of the inhabitants of China, Japan, India, and dozens of smaller Old World regions, while its use as a vegetable in tropical America is practically universal. A considerable part of the starch manufactured in Europe still comes from rice, and in India the intoxicating beverage arrack is made from it. The Japanese saké, a sweetish intoxicating liquor, is also made from rice. Notwithstanding its wide use it is not as nutritious as wheat or corn, being much lower in proteins than either of them.
More than 2800 years before Christ the Chinese cultivated rice, for at that time one of the emperors instituted a ceremony in which the grain plays the chief part. It has been grown on land useful to almost no other crops as it is usually subject to inundations. Some varieties, however, have been developed which will grow on uplands and these are grown even on terraced land both in China and the Philippines. It needs a heavy rainfall, however, and grows best in lands that are flooded. It is occasional dry seasons that produce the famines of India when the crop fails. The botanical name of rice is Oryza sativa, and it is known now as a wild plant in India and tropical Australia. Its introduction into Europe must have been long after wheat, for rice is not mentioned in the Bible, and was unknown in Italy before 1468, when it was first grown near Pisa. Rice paper, which some people think is made from this grain, comes from the pith of Aralia papyrifera, a tree of the rain forests of Formosa, related to our temperate region Hercules’-club.
SUGAR
In the chapter on what plants do with the material they take from the air and soil we found that sugar was one of the first fruits of that process. In at least two plants the overproduction of sugar is on such a great scale that our chief supplies of this substance now come from these two plants—the sugar cane, which is a tall grass, and the sugar beet. Hundreds of other plants produce surplus sugar, but for commercial purposes these two, and the sap of the sugar maple (Acer saccharum), are our chief sources of supply.
Cane sugar is an Old World grass known as Saccharum officinarum, frequently growing twelve feet high, and with a solid woody stem, quite unlike our ordinary grasses. It looks not unlike corn on a stout stem, and it is the stem which is cut and from which the sweet juice is pressed out between great rollers. The pressed-out juice goes through various processes in the course of which first molasses, then brown sugar, and finally white granulated sugar are produced.
Our consumption of sugar is now on such a scale that we scarcely realize that before the days of Shakespeare it was very scarce and expensive. Even as recently as 1840 it regularly sold in England for forty-eight shillings per hundred pounds, wholesale. At that time the total consumption in the world was only slightly over a million tons, while to-day it is over fifteen times that amount. The plant is native in tropical Asia, but just where is not known, nor are wild plants found in any quantity. It has been much modified by long cultivation, and has been reproduced by root-stocks for so long a period that it is rare for the plant to bear flower and seed. It has been known in India since before the Christian era, and was taken from there to China about 200 B. C. Neither the Greeks nor Romans knew much about it, nor do the Hebrew writings mention it. Somewhere in the Middle Ages the Arabs brought it into Egypt, Sicily, and Spain. Not until the discovery of the New World was it cultivated on any considerable scale, when the climate of Santo Domingo and Cuba and the African slaves imported to those islands afforded conditions that resulted in Cuba at least being one of the world’s chief sugar-producing countries. Sugar cane is now grown all over the earth in regions with a hot, moist climate, India and neighboring countries producing over half the world’s supply. Practically all the sugar produced in India is used there, however, so that the American tropics furnish to Europe and America about one-third of the world’s total consumption of cane sugar.
In 1840 under fifty thousand tons of beet sugar were produced, while in 1900 more sugar from this plant was made than from sugar cane. Considerably more than half this beet sugar was grown in three countries, Russia, Austria, and Germany, which explains what the great war has done to the sugar market. The plant from which beet sugar is derived is botanically the same as the common garden beet, Beta vulgaris, which is wild on sandy beaches along the Mediterranean and Caspian seas, and perhaps in India. Much cultivation has made this slender-rooted plant into the large-rooted vegetable we now have and its sugar content was much increased by Vilmorin, a French horticulturist. Many garden varieties are known, and some of these are grown in the United States, where beet sugar is produced, although in 1910 less than half a million tons were made here as against over four million tons in Europe. While the beet as a vegetable was known perhaps a century or two before the time of Christ, it was not until 1760 that its sugar content was understood, and it was nearly eighty years later before beet sugar became commercially important. Its cultivation in England on any considerable scale did not begin before the beginning of the present century.