cloth. It was also found in Mexico and Peru. It is a significant fact
that the cotton-plant has been found growing wild in many parts of
America, but never in the Old World. This would seem to indicate that
the plant was a native of America; and this is confirmed by the
superiority of American cotton, and the further fact that the plants
taken from America to India constantly degenerate, while those taken
from India to America as constantly improve.

There is a question whether the potato, maize, and tobacco were not
cultivated in China ages before Columbus discovered America. A recent
traveller says, "The interior of China, along the course of the
Yang-tse-Kiang, is a land full of wonders. In one place piscicultural
nurseries line the banks for nearly fifty miles. All sorts of
inventions, the cotton-gin included, claimed by Europeans and Americans,
are to be found there forty centuries old. Plants, yielding drugs of
great value, without number, the familiar tobacco and potato, maize,
white and yellow corn, and other plants believed to be indigenous to
America, have been cultivated there from time immemorial."

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