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take to nourish themselves on a plant of the group of the euphorbia. The transition is easy, though the danger is continually augmenting. In fact, the natives of the Society and Molucca islands, who are unacquainted with the jatropha manihot, cultivate the arum macrorrhizon and the tacca pinnatifida. The root of this last plant requires the same precaution as the manioc, and yet the tacca bread competes in the market of Banda with the sagou bread.

The cultivation of the manioc requires more care than that of the banana. It resembles that of potatoes, and the harvest takes place only from seven to eight months after the slips have been planted. The people who can plant the jatropha have already made great advances towards civilization. There are even varieties of the manioe, for example, those which are called at Cayenne manioc bois blanc, and manioc mai-pourri-rouge, of which the roots can only be pulled up at the end of fifteen months. The savage of New Zealand would not certainly have the patience to wait for so tardy a harvest.

Plantations of jatropha manihot are now found along the coast from the mouth of the river of Guasacualco to the north of Santander, and from Tehuantepec to San Blas and Sinaloa, in the low and warm regions of the intendancies of Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, Puebla, Mexico, Valladolid, and Guadalaxara. M. Aublet, a judicious botanist, who, happily, has not disdained in his travels to

inquire into the agriculture of the tropics, says very justly," that the manioc is one of the finest and most useful productions of the American soil, and that with this plant the inhabitant of the torrid zone could dispense with rice and every sort of wheat, as well as all the roots and fruits which serve as nourishment to the human species."

Maize occupies the same region as the banana and the manioc; but its cultivation is still more important and more extensive, especially than that of the two plants which we have been describing. Advancing towards the central tableland we meet with fields of maize all the way from the coast to the valley of Toluca, which is more than 2800 metres* above the level of the ocean. The year in which the maize harvest fails is a year of famine and misery for the inhabitants of Mexico.

It is no longer doubted among botanists, that maize, or Turkey corn, is a true American grain, and that the old continent received it from the new. It appears also that the cultivation of this plant in Spain long preceded that of potatoes. Oviedo †, whose first essay on the natural history of the Indies was printed at Toledo in 1525, says that he saw maize cultivated in Andalusia, near the chapel of Atocha, in the environs of Madrid.

9185 feet.

Trans.

+ Rerum Medicarum Novce Hispania Thesaurus, 1651, lib. vii. c. 40. p. 247.

This assertion is so much the more remarkable, as from a passage of Hernandez (book vii. chap. 40) we might believe that maize was still unknown in Spain in the time of Philip the Second, towards the end of the 16th century.

On the discovery of America by the Europeans, the zea maize (tlaolli in the Aztec language, mahiz in the Haitian, and cara in the Quichua) I was cultivated from the most southern part of Chili to Pennsylvania. According to a tradition of the Aztec people, the Toultecs, in the 7th ⚫ century of our æra, were the first who introduced into Mexico the cultivation of maize, cotton, and pimento. It might happen, however, that these different branches of agriculture existed before the Toultecs, and that this nation, the great civilization of which has been celebrated by all the historians, merely extended them successfully. Hernandez informs us, that the Otamites even, who were only a wandering and barbarous people, planted maize. The cultivation of this grain consequently extended beyond the Rio Grande de Santiago, formerly called Tololotlan.

The maize introduced into the north of Europe suffers from the cold wherever the mean temperature does not reach seven or eight degrees of the centigrade thermometer *. We therefore see

* 44° or 46° of Fahrenheit. Trans.

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rye, and especially barley, vegetate vigorously on the ridge of the Cordilleras, at heights where, on account of the roughness of the climate, the cultivation of maize would be attended with no success. But, on the other hand, the latter descends to the warmest regions of the torrid zone, even to plains where wheat, barley, and rye, cannot develope themselves. Hence on the scale of the different kinds of cultivation, the maize, at present, occupies a much greater extent in the equinoxial part of America than the cerealia of the old continent. The maize, also, of all the grains useful to man, is the one whose farinaceous perisperma has the greatest volume.

It is commonly believed that this plant is the only species of grain known by the Americans before the arrival of the Europeans. It appears, however, certain enough, that in Chili in the fifteenth century, and even long before, besides the zea maize and the zea curagua, two gramina called magu and tuca were cultivated, of which, according to the Abbé Molina, the first was a species of rye, and the second a species of barley. The bread of this araucan bread went by the name of covque, a word which afterwards was applied to the bread made of European corn *. Hernandez even pretends to have found among the Indians of Mechoacan a species of wheat †,

* Molina, Histoire naturelle de Chili, p. 101.
↑ Hernandez, VII. p. 43. Clavigero, I. p. 56, note F.

former year the produce was 79, and for the latter 70 for one. This coast in general appears better adapted for the cultivation of the cerealia of Esrope. However it is proved by the same tables, that in some parts of New California, for example, in the fields belonging to the villages of San Buena Ventura and Capistrano, the maize has frequently yielded from 180 to 900 for one.

Although a great quantity of other grain is cultivated in Mexico, the maize must be considered as the principal food of the people, as also of the most part of the domestic animak. The price of this commodity modifies that of all the others, of which it is, as it were, the natural measure. When the harvest is poor, either from the want of rain or from premature frost, the famice is general, and produces the most fatal consequences. Fowls, turkies, and even the larger cattle, equally suffer from it. A traveller who passes through a country in which the maize has been frost bit finds neither egg nor poultry, nor crepa bread, nor meal for the atolli, which is a nutritive and agreeable soup. The dearth of provisions is especially felt in the environs of the Mexican mines; in those of Guanaxuato, for example, where fourteen thousand mules, which are necessary in the process of amalgamation, annually consume an enormous quantity of maize. We have already mentioned the influence which dearths have periodically had on the

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