New evidence concerning the origin of maize — a question which has puzzled botanists for more than a century — has made it possible to reach several rather definite conclusions:

1. (1) Maize is undoubtedly an American plant.

2. (2) Maize undoubtedly had at least one center of origin in Middle America.

3. (3) The ancestor of maize is maize.

4. (4) The ancestor of maize is a form of pod corn, hut perhaps not the extreme type of pod corn known today. The ancestor was certainly a popcorn.

5. (5) Sometime in its history maize hybridized with Tripsacum or teosinte or both to produce radically new types which comprise the majority of modern maize varieties of North America.

The evidence on which these rather sweeping conclusions rest comes from three fields —botany, archaeology, and genetics.

Substantially conclusive evidence of the American origin of maize was obtained from fossil pollen grains discovered at a depth of more than 200 feet below Mexico City.

I am indebted to my former Galapagos colleague, Mr. Joseph R. Slevin, Curator of Herpetology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, for the following data which may have some pertinence in the moot problem of Amerindian archaeology in the Galapagos Islands. Mr. Slevin, recently in London, excerpted portions of the original logs and diaries of early voyagers to the Galapagos for his book on that group.

From the log book of the Ship Rattler, Captain James Colnett, R. N., April 26, 1794, referring to James Island: “At several places he [the chief mate] stopped found numbers of jars, old iron, and a decayed dagger and several other articles decayed with time and which we still conjecture was left here by the buccaneers.” The whaling master of the Rattler also found broken pieces of jars.

Apropos of buccaneers leaving supplies are the following quotations from the diaries of buccaneer Captains Davies and Ambrose Cowley.