Nature Bulletin No. 575-A   October 4, 1975
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
George W. Dunne, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt of Conservation

****:MAIZE

On November 5, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal 
that, in the interior of Cuba, there was a great deal of land "sowed with 
a sort of beans and a sort of grain they call Mahiz, which was well 
tasted, baked, dried, and made into flour." Later, Spanish explorers 
found this plant being cultivated as the principal food crop in every 
land from New Mexico to Peru and Chile.

Columbus took some of the grain back to Spain and for a while it was 
grown in gardens as a curiosity. By 1539 it had been introduced into 
Turkey and grown so extensively there that it became known as 
Turkish Corn, "corn" being an English term for cereal grains such as 
wheat and barley. Today, in Europe, it is called maize or Indian corn.

When the Pilgrims landed in 1620 they found, buried beneath a heap 
of sand, a large basket of "corn, some in ears, faire and good, of 
diverse colours. " Luckily, they saved it until the following spring 
when Squanto, a friendly Indian, showed them how to plant it, with 
three herring placed spokewise on each hillock. That crop of corn 
saved them from starvation and at harvest time they celebrated with a 
feast of Thanksgiving.

The prehistoric mound builders and cliff dwellers, and some cave 
dwellers who lived 4000 years ago, were corn-growing and corn-eating 
peoples. Corn was the backbone of the remarkable civilizations 
developed by the Aztecs in Mexico, the Mayas in Central America, 
and the fabulous Incas of Bolivia and Peru. It was a staple food in 
North America for every Indian tribe from Arizona and the Great 
Plains to the Atlantic coast.

There was a great diversity of varieties and of colors, including yellow, 
red, blue and white. All of the principal types we know today -- dent 
corn, flint corn, flour or soft corn, sweet corn and pop corn -- were in 
existence when America was discovered but none has ever been found 
growing wild. Somehow, maize became so domesticated and 
specialized that it could no longer reproduce itself unless its seed was 
gathered, planted and tended by man. Its origin is a mystery.

Corn is a grass. It belongs to the great plant family which includes the 
myriad of grasses that cover our lawns, pastures and prairies. That 
family also includes bamboo and sugar cane, as well as rice, wheat, 
barley, rye, oats, kaffir corn and other grains.

Corn or maize, however, differs from all other grasses, whether wild 
or cultivated, in the nature of its female seed-producing flowers. At the 
top of the stalk are the male flowers, the tassel, that shed pollen. Down 
on the stalk it develops one or more "ears, " the female flowers, 
enclosed in husks. Each ear is tufted with the sticky ends of many 
threads of "silk. " At the inner end of each thread, fertilized by a 
microscopic grain of pollen, is a flower that develops a seed or kernel. 
The mature ear is a compact mass of such kernels in parallel rows 
upon the rigid central "cob. "

For many years it was thought that corn originated from Teosinte, a 
wild grass found in Guatemala and southern Mexico. It has tassels 
and, borne separately, tiny ears with 5 or 6 seeds each enclosed in a 
bony shell. A more distant relative is Tripsacum, a wild grass that 
occurs in both North and South America.

In South America there was a peculiar primitive plant, now virtually 
extinct, called "pod" corn. On a slender cob it produces kernels each 
enclosed in a chaffy shell or pod, similar to wheat and other cereals. 
Crossed with Tripsacum, the hybrid is a plant resembling teosinte. Pod 
corn, not teosinte, was probably the ancestor of maize -- King Corn -- 
the most important plant in America.