Bonafous ("Histoire Naturelle du Mais,” Paris, 1826) attributes a European or Asiatic origin to maize.  The word maize, (Indian corn) is derived from mahiz or mahis, the name of the plant in the language of the Island of Hayti.  And yet, strange to may, in the Lettish and Livonian languages, in the north of Europe, mayse signifies bread; in Irish, maise is food, and in the Old High German, maz is meat.  May not likewise the Spanish maiz have antedated the time of Columbus, and borne testimony to early intercommunication between the people of the Old and New Worlds?

It is to Atlantis we must look for the origin of nearly all our valuable plants.  Darwin says ("Animals and Plants under Domestication,” vol. i., p. 374), “It has often been remarked that we do not owe a single useful plant to Australia, or the Cape of Good Hope—­countries abounding to an unparalleled degree with endemic species—­or to New Zealand, or to America south of the Plata; and, according to some authors, not to America north of Mexico.”  In other words, the domesticated plants are only found within the limits of what I shall show hereafter was the Empire of Atlantis and its colonies; for only here was to be found an ancient, long-continuing civilization, capable of developing from a wild state those plants which were valuable to man, including all the cereals on which to-day civilized man depends for subsistence.  M. Alphonse de Candolle tells us that we owe 33 useful plants to Mexico, Peru, and Chili.  According to the same high authority, of 157 valuable cultivated plants 85 can be traced back to their wild state; as to 40, there is doubt as to their origin; while 32 are utterly unknown in their aboriginal condition. ("Geograph.  Botan.  Raisonnee,” 1855, pp. 810-991.) Certain roses—­the imperial lily, the tuberose and the lilac—­are said to have been cultivated from such a vast antiquity that they are not known in their wild state. (Darwin, “Animals and Plants,” vol. i., p. 370.) And these facts are the more remarkable because, as De Candolle has shown, all the plants historically known to have been first cultivated in Europe still exist there in the wild state. (Ibid.) The inference is strong that the great cereals—­wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize—­must have been first domesticated in a vast antiquity, or in some continent which has since disappeared, carrying the original wild plants with it.

Cereals of the age of stone in Europe

Darwin quotes approvingly the opinion of Mr. Bentham ("Hist.  Notes Cult.  Plants"), “as the result of all the most reliable evidence that none of the Ceralia—­wheat, rye, barley, and oats—­exist or have existed truly wild in their present state.”  In the Stone Age of Europe five varieties of wheat and three of barley were cultivated. (Darwin, “Animals and Plants,” vol. i., p. 382.) He says that it may be inferred, from the presence in the lake habitations of Switzerland