THE RACES OF CORN.
We find in New England cornfields, sweet corn and flint corn; in the Corn Belt of the Central States, chiefly the yellow dents; in the South, white dent varieties. Dent corns have their starchy content extended to the top of the grain, and shrinking at maturity, thus forming the dent, or depression. Flint corn is not so, for the starchy centre is overlaid with the layer of hard, horny material that does not shrink.
Pop corn is small, and its grains explode into a light, cottony mass when heated. Sweet corn is rich in sugar and protein. Its kernels shrink and wrinkle in drying. Pod corn, called also "coyote corn," is a Mexican race that has each kernel, as well as the ear, enclosed in a papery husk. Pop corn may have originated from a primitive pod corn. In the mummy cases of Peruvian tombs grains of another type were first found by scientists. It is called soft corn, because the horny part is wanting in the grain. It is now grown in Mexico and parts of South America.
Darwin thought that all the "agricultural species" of corn are descendants of the pod corn of Mexico. The best authorities now hold that the aboriginal ancestor of corn is probably extinct. The corn-like plant, teosinte, that grows wild in Mexico, is believed to be one parent of corn, but the other is unknown. Wild corn has never been found.
Whatever the form of the original wild species, there have sprung from it the six races named above: pod, pop, sweet, flint, soft, and dent.
Sweet corn was in cultivation by the Susque hanna Indians in 1779, when its qualities were first discovered by white settlers. No history of the species is known behind that date, though many varieties have been developed since. The great industry of canning corn is supplied by fields of this green crop. It is an important vegetable in American gardens throughout the growing season.
The seventy-day corn of the colder parts of the country, that makes a dwarf stalk, and attends strictly to the business of maturing the ears before frost comes, illustrates the changes that adapt a plant to its environment. The zo-foot stalks in a Southern field, that take six months to produce a crop, illustrate the same fact. Varieties have "strains" adapted to difficult conditions of climate and soil.
The native country of the maize plant is probably Mexico. We cannot be sure. It was unknown in Europe when the Spaniards under Columbus found the Indians on the Island of Haiti growing fields of a strange plant they called "mahiz." In a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus says of his brother: "During a journey into the interior he found a dense popu lation, entirely agricultural, and at one place passed through eighteen miles of cornfields."
De Soto wrote home about the Indian villages, where corn and meal were stored in large quan tities, and miles upon miles of growing grain surrounded them. Cortez was amazed at the flourishing fields of corn growing in Mexico, and the stores of this grain gathered as tribute by the ruler. The Puritans were saved from starvation during those first terrible winters by corn brought them by the friendly Indians. Fifty years later the same Puritans, or their sons, in the King Philip's war, "took possession of one thousand acres of corn, which was harvested by the English, and disposed of according to their direction." The Six Nations, the best-organized confederation of American Indians, had cultivated apple orchards and cornfields that the white settlers could not match, in central New York. In the middle part of the country other tribes raised corn for their food supply. Indian mounds, of uncertain but ancient date, contain corn, as did the tombs of the Incas in Peru, where the maize plant was wor shipped as a divinity that had the life of the people in its hand. Far back to the earliest times goes this reverence for the plant that feeds the race.
No wild plant that looks at all like corn has been found in foreign countries, though a thorough search has been made in all likely places by scien tists. The best authorities agree that if the plant had been grown in Europe or Asia before it was taken there from America it would have been known and written about. So it must be Ameri can in origin.
The corn kernel is a little plant, wrapped up with the provision that is to sustain it through the period between its sprouting in the ground, and the appearance of root and leaf blade, capable of supporting the plant independently. All these possibilities and good promises are wrapped up in a tough, waterproof skin, the hull of the grain. The clear, horny portion under the hull is rich in protein, the muscle-making part. The germ, or embryo corn plant, is rich in oil. The white filling of the kernel is starch, the solid, granular portion that was soft and sweet when the corn was "in the milk." It is quite possible in corn to separate the parts bearing oil, protein and starch, at a glance, for the germ has a distinct shape and outline, and the dark proteid matter contrasts in color with the white starch.