A Jew has assured me that corn came by itself in Mesopotamia, like the
apples, wild pears, chestnuts, medlars in the West. I want to believe
it until I am sure of the contrary; for corn must certainly grow
somewhere. It has become the ordinary and indispensable food in the good
climates, and throughout the North.
Some great philosophers whose talents we esteem and whose systems we do
not follow (Buffon) have claimed on page 195 of the "Natural History of
the Dog," that mankind has made corn; that our fathers by virtue of
sowing lolium and gramina changed them into wheat. As these philosophers
are not of our opinion about shells, they will permit us not to be of
theirs about corn. We do not believe that one has ever made tulips grow
from jasmin. We find that the germ of corn is quite different from that
of lolium, and we do not believe in any transmutation. When somebody
shows it to us we will retract.
Corn assuredly is not the food of the greater part of the world. Maize,
tapioca, feed the whole of America. We have entire provinces where the
peasants eat nothing but chestnut bread, more nourishing and of better
flavour than that of rye and barley which so many people eat, and which
is much better than the ration bread which is given to the soldier. The
whole of southern Africa does not know of bread. The immense archipelago
of the Indies, Siam, Laos, Pegu, Cochin China, Tonkin, a part of China,
Japan, the coast of Malabar and Coromandel, the banks of the Ganges
furnish a rice, the cultivation of which is much easier than that of
wheat, and which causes it to be neglected.
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