Turning now to the vegetable kingdom, we find the cornplants—the plants which are best adapted for the food of civilized man—scattered profusely over the Temperate Zone. It is only when man has settled down in a fixed abode, —when he has abandoned his nomadic life and become an agriculturist, attaching himself to a certain locality, —that it is possible for him to rear corn. Corn is not self-sustaining, self-diffusing, like the wild grass. Self-sown, it gradually dwindles away, and finally disappears. "It can only be reared permanently by being sown by man's own hand, and in ground which man's own hand has tilled."

Corn is the food most convenient and most suitable for man in a social state. It is only by the careful cultivation of it that a country becomes capable of permanently supporting a dense population. All other kinds of food are precarious, and cannot be stored up for any length of time: roots and fruits are soon exhausted; the produce of the chase is uncertain, and if hard pressed ceases to yield a supply. In some countries the pith of the sago-palm, the fruit of the bread-fruit tree, the root of the esculent fern, and similar food, supplied spontaneously by nature, serve to maintain a thinly scattered and easily satisfied population; but man in these rude circumstances is invariably found depraved in body and in mind, and hopelessly incapable of bettering his condition. But the cultivation of corn, while it furnishes him with a supply of food for the greater part of the year, imposes upon him certain labours and restraints which have a most beneficial influence upon his character and habits.