MAIWAND, a village of Afghanistan, 50 m. N.W. of Kandahar. It is chiefly notable for the defeat inflicted on a British brigade under General Burrows by Ayub Khan on the 27th of July 1880 during the second Afghan War (see AFGHANISTAN). Ayub Khan, Shere Ali's younger son, who had been holding Herat during the British operations at Kabul and Kandahar, set out towards Kandahar with a small army in June 1880, and a brigade under General Burrows was detached from Kandahar to oppose him. Burrows advanced to the Helmund, opposite Girishk, to oppose Ayub Khan, but was there deserted by the troops of Shere Ali, the wali of Kandahar, and forced to retreat to Kushk-i-Nakhud, half way to Kandahar. In order to prevent Ayub passing to Ghazni, Burrows advanced to Maiwand on the 27th of July, and attacked Ayub, who had already seized that place. The Afghans, who numbered 25,000, outflanked the British, the artillery expended their ammunition, and the native portion of the Brigade got out of hand and pressed back on the few British infantry. The British were completely routed, and had to thank the apathy of the Afghans for escaping total annihilation. Of the 2476 British troops engaged, 934 were killed and 175 wounded or missing. This defeat necessitated Sir Frederick Roberts' famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. See Lord Roberts, _Forty-one Years in India_ (1896). MAIZE, or INDIAN CORN, _Zea Mays_ (from [Greek: zeá] or [Greek: zeiá], which appears to have been "spelt," _Triticum spelta_, according to the description of Theophrastus), a plant of the tribe Maydeae of the order Gramineae or grasses (see fig. 1). It is unknown in the native state, but is most probably indigenous to tropical America. Small grains of an unknown variety have been found in the ancient tombs of Peru, and Darwin found heads of maize embedded on the shore in Peru at 85 ft. above the present sea-level. Bonafous, however (_Histoire naturelle du maïs_), quotes authorities (Bock, 1532, Ruel and Fuchs) as believing that it came from Asia, and maize was said by Santa Rosa de Viterbo to have been brought by the Arabs into Spain in the 13th century. A drawing of maize is also given by Bonafous from a Chinese work on natural history, _Li-chi-tchin_, dated 1562, a little over sixty years after the discovery of the New World. It is not figured on Egyptian monuments, nor was any mention made of it by Eastern travellers in Africa or Asia prior to the 16th century. Humboldt, Alphonse de Candolle and others, however, do not hesitate to say that it originated solely in America, where it had been long and extensively cultivated at the period of the discovery of the New World; and that is the generally accepted modern view. Some hold the view that maize originated from a common Mexican fodder grass, _Euchlaena mexicana_, known as Teosinte, a closely allied plant which when crossed with maize yields a maize-like hybrid. [Illustration: FIG. 1.