, The Chinese, who have always been diligent agriculturists, attach great importance to the influence of the moon upon vegetation, and have a table of those plants which invariably flower in the night, and their great religious agricultural festival, at which the emperor ploughs a furrow with his own hand and sows the five kinds of grain, is always regulated by the moon. The five kinds of grain sown by the emperor are those introduced by Chin-Nong, and consist of wheat, rice, millet, beans, and caoleang, probably Holcus sorghum, which is widely cultivated in Asia and Africa, and was formerly well known in Greece and Rome, and which is now called Guinea corn or Caffre corn, although it may possibly have been maize, which, as I have pointed out, was known early in China. A festival very similar to that of China took place in ancient Egypt and in Peru, in both of which countries the monarch held the plough and sowed the grain, which, of course, in Peru consisted of maize, and at the close of the maize harvest some of the corn was made into an image called a 'Pirva,' which was held in great veneration.

A writer in the Monthly Packet (November 1877) has pointed out the great resemblance between this ancient Peruvian festival and some harvest customs which still exist in Great Britain. Thus in Northumberland it was formerly the custom to dress an image, crowned with flowers and holding a sheaf of corn and a sickle, and to fix it to a pole in the fields, whence it was brought home on the last day of harvest by the reapers with music and dancing; in some villages a kern or corn baby is still kept. Devonshire farmers make a kind of image of the last ears of corn twisted together, which is brought in with great rejoicings at every harvest home, and called a knack, which it is very unlucky to part with till the next harvest. In Scotland the last handful of corn reaped used to be called the Maiden, and was formed into a cross and carefully kept, the supper following being called the Maiden Feast.

It will be observed that not only is maize absent from the five kinds of grain sown by Chin-Nong, but also barley and oats, so that we may conclude that all three were alike unknown in China at that early period, although barley was certainly very anciently known and cultivated in Egypt.

Maize is hardly used for the making of bread in the sense in which we use the term, although in America it was doubtless from time immemorial ground and made into cakes resembling oat cake. The Mexican, Peruvian, and Central American graves of very ancient date contain numbers of grinding stones, made something like a stool with short legs, the top sloping and somewhat hollowed out. These are always accompanied by large stones resembling short rolling-pins, with which the Indian women crushed the maize and made it fit to boil into porridge or make into cakes. The Kaffirs generally take maize - I do not know the Kaffir name, but the Colonists call it mealies (a term, by the way, which the generality of English people take to mean potatoes) - and put a quantity into a jar or pot of water, pile burning fuel round it, and let it stew all day: it thus swells and becomes tender, and is eaten in this form as their staple food. Sometimes the women stamp it in a wooden mortar with one, or sometimes two, long pestles to get off the outer husk, and occasionally they grind it on stones in the same manner as the ancient American Indian did, and make cakes of the flour.

It is only of late that our English cooks have deigned to make use of this foreign bread-stuff. When first introduced, it was deemed only fit to feed pigs and poultry: we are so exceedingly conservative, especially with regard to food, that it requires at least half a century to acclimatise a new comestible, but at last we have accepted maize in its various forms as passably good food for John Bull and his family. Brown & Poison's corn flour is perhaps the best known and most extensively used of all, and this is not a flour ground in a mill, but a precipitated starch. Maizena, hominy, Oswego, and other preparations of Indian corn are also now in common use, and doubtless enter into the composition of sundry cakes, biscuits, etc., which formerly were compounded solely of wheat flour, and are extensively used for thickening soups, gravies, blancmanges, and custards, instead of the far more expensive isinglass, eggs, etc., which are recommended in cookery books. But we have not yet attained to the full knowledge of the capabilities of this useful cereal, and cannot compound the endless variety of corn cakes and crackers in use in America. Doubtless, in time we shall come to appreciate all these foreign delicacies, but at present we are content to make wheat our staple cereal, and to use maize merely as an adjunct, except as cattle and poultry food, for which it has come into general use, being cheap and abundant, although I am still conservative enough to believe that poultry fed by the old method - that is, upon barley-meal and potatoes - are far better than those fattened upon Indian corn, which, if used exclusively, is apt to make more yellow fat than that firm, white meat so much appreciated by the cook and housekeeper.

There are innumerable varieties of this useful cereal, some being almost black, some quite white, others red, and the commonest variety yellow. The size of the grain also varies greatly from large kernels, pressed tightly together on the cob so as to form a compact mass difficult to separate, to very small grains of opal-like lustre scarcely larger than a good grain of wheat, and so arranged on the little cob as to retain a rounded egg-like form, pointed at the extremity. This is the kind which is grown especially for eating as green corn, being peculiarly tender and delicate. Parched Indian corn is much eaten by the natives, and it is said that an Indian will subsist a long time on six or eight ounces per day of parched corn mixed with water. The dried leaves also form an excellent forage for horses and cattle, and in Mexico the green stalks are cut and eaten as a sweetmeat, there being a large amount of sugar in them.

The tortillas of Mexico, so often mentioned in books of travel, are made, according to Captain Lyon, of crushed maize formed with water into unleavened cakes, baked on the hearth, and eaten with a sauce compounded of chilies. 'In the houses of respectable people a woman, called from her office, Tortillera, is kept for the express purpose of making these cakes; and it sounds very oddly to the ear of a stranger, during meal-times to hear the rapid patting and clapping which goes forward in the cooking-place until all demands are satisfied.'

It may be observed that among the cereals regarded by the Chinese as of the first importance, the two millets are almost unknown among ourselves. They never figure among the grains in common use, and, although frequently used on the Continent as a thickening for soups, and sometimes in England for making milk-puddings, they are seldom found in English kitchens. Yet under the name of Dourah one of the millets forms the chief food of the Egyptians; and Guinea or Kaffir corn is almost as much used as maize or wheat all over the African continent, where three harvests of it may be reaped yearly. It is also largely consumed in Arabia, Syria, and in the West Indies among the negroes. It was doubtless much more used anciently than at present, being especially suited to countries where little rain falls, and the soil is too poor and sandy for the cultivation of wheat or maize.

Buck-wheat, which is much grown on the Continent as food for cattle and poultry, is not used for human food, except among the very poor, who sometimes mix it with a little flour and make of it a black bitterish bread, not at all appetising or nourishing; but all kinds of birds and animals are very fond of it, and it is grown for feeding pheasants in England, and also for bees, who collect much honey from the blossoms. Pigs are said to become intoxicated by eating buck-wheat, and are quickly fattened upon it, whilst it causes cows fed upon it to yield a larger quantity of rich milk.