Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/233

Rh said in their favor. The word maize (mays) itself is strictly American, but this name has been in use only since adopted by Matthiole in 1570. In modern European languages the common name has been one purporting to show eastern origin, in English Indian corn, in French blé de Turquie or Turkish wheat. Since maize is not wheat, it might almost be concluded it was not Turkish. The trouble was. one could not prove it. As a matter of fact, such names only show the tendency of a people simply to indicate the foreign origin of an introduced article, as when the French gave the name coq d'Inde or Indian cock to the American turkey. According to De Candolle maize was called Roman corn in Lorraine and Vosges, Sicilian corn in Tuscany, Indian corn in Sicily and Spanish corn in the Pyrenées. The Turks call it Egyptian corn and the Egyptians, Syrian dourra, which prove it to be neither Egyptian nor Syrian.

It has been generally agreed by historians that there was no Hebrew or Sanskrit word for maize and that there was no Egyptian representation of the plant. It is true, Rifaud found an ear of maize in a tomb at Thebes, but this was the work of a modern impostor, for if maize had been a crop of ancient Egypt, pictures of it would have been as plentiful as they are of other Egyptian plants. The plant certainly was not known in Europe in early times, but the question ever arose whether or not it could have been introduced from the East during the Middle Ages. Bonafous, who was the foremost writer on the subject in the early nineteenth century, took this view and was responsible for long continued doubt on the subject. The principal evidence on the question was that obtained from a charter drawn up between two crusaders in 1204, according to which seeds thought to be maize and brought from Anatolia were presented to the town of Incisa. Historians of the crusades made much of this charter, although botanists thought from