A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated wheat in New Spain. He had found three grains of it amongst the rice which had been brought from Spain for provision for the army. In the Franciscan convent at Quito, I saw preserved as a relic the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sowed there by the Franciscan monk Fray Jodoco Rixi, a native of Ghent in Flanders. The first sowing had been made in front of the convent, on what is now the Plazuela de San Francisco, after cutting down the forest which then extended from the foot of the volcano of Pichincha to the spot in question. The monks, who I often visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain to them the inscription on the earthen vessel, which they thought must contain some mystic reference to the wheat. I read the motto, which was in the old German dialect, and was--“Whoso drinks from me let him not forget his God.” I too felt with the monks that this old German drinking vessel was a truly venerable relic. Would that there had been preserved every where in the New Continent the names, not of those who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who first intrusted to it these its fruits so early associated with the civilisation of mankind in the Old Continent! In respect generally to the names of the kinds of grain, as bearing on the original affinities of different languages, a high authority has remarked, that “such indications are much more rare in the case of different kinds of grain, and on subjects of agriculture, than on those connected with the care of cattle: herdsmen when dispersed had still much in common, whereas the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to create new words. But the fact that in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks appear nearly on a par with the Germans and Slavonians, argues in favour of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet the Indian “java” (Frumentum hordeum), compared with the Lithuanian “jawai,” and the Finnish “jywa,” offers a singular exception.” (Jac. Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, Th. i. S. 69.) [28] p. 14.--“_Keeping by preference to the cooler mountain regions._” Throughout Mexico and Peru the traces of a great degree of civilisation are confined to the elevated plateaux. We have seen on the Andes the ruins of palaces and baths at heights between 1600 and 1800 toises (10230 and 11510 English feet). It can only have been men of a northern race, who, migrating from the north towards the south, could find delight in such a climate. [29] p. 15.--“_The history of the peopling of Japan._”