Fields of maize are growing below sea level in the Caspian plain and at altitudes of more than 12,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes. Corn is cultivated in regions of less than ten inches of annual rainfall in the semi-arid plains of Russia, and in regions with more than 200 inches of rain in the tropics of Hindustan. It thrives almost equally well in the short summers of Canada and the perpetual summer of tropical Colombia.[16] For the Gaspé Peninsula in the province of Quebec and for the Pyrenees Mountains there is a variety that matures in two months; for Colombia there is one that requires ten or eleven months. The height ranges from two feet to twenty; the leaves vary from eight to forty-eight; the number of stalks by a single seed, from one to twelve; the ears from three inches to three feet. Authorities used to list from five to eight basically different types of corn; the five are sweet, flour, dent, flint, and pop. “The Russians,” write P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, “have already collected more than 8,000 varieties.”[17] [Illustration: “TURKIE CORNE” _By 1578, maize had spread so widely in the Old World that in Dodoen’s_ A Newe Herball _the habitat of this “marvelous strange plant” was attributed to Turkey. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)_] [Illustration: A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PICTURE OF CORN _Part of a page from Parkinson’s_ Theatrum Botanicum, _published in 1640. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)_] All the chief types of corn known today were developed by the Indians to suit the wide variety of lands and climates in which they lived. The feat seems all the more remarkable because botanists tell us that all these varieties had to be developed by keen observation and hard work from a single parent species—_Zea mays L._—and modern man has never found corn in a wild form. This amazingly varied plant, which cannot properly seed itself and will die without man’s intervention, was evolved from a plant that is now apparently extinct. In spite of the old saw about the staff of life, a starchy grain is not the ideal food; but corn, says Sauer, is the most useful of all American starches because in addition to its ease of storage “it contains also fat and protein and is a more nearly complete food than the others.”[18] How Old Is Corn?