The principal crops cultivated in British Central Africa are maize, millet (of several kinds), rice, ground-nuts, beans, sweet potatoes, cassava, yams, pumpkins, several kinds of gourds, and tobacco. Bananas are planted near most villages in the Shiré Highlands, and are the staple crop of the Wankonde; they are less common west of the Upper Shiré. Cotton and sugar-cane are grown in some places; also the saccharine sorghum (the _imfe_ of the Zulus); but no sugar is made—both kinds of cane are only used for chewing. Sesamum (_chitowe_) is grown in order to extract the oil from the seeds, and _chamba_ (Indian hemp) for smoking. In villages near Blantyre, a few papaw-trees, pine-apples, and grenadillas are grown; but most of the fruits eaten by natives are wild ones. A certain number of plants are utilised which grow with little or no cultivation. Most villages are surrounded by castor-oil bushes; tomatoes (and, where they have been introduced, Cape gooseberries) grow like weeds among the other crops; so does a tiny kind of grain (_Eleusine_, I believe), like small bird-seed, which is called _maere_, and is so troublesome to husk and prepare, besides not being very palatable, that it is not gathered except in times of scarcity. Various plants which grow wild, or spring up like weeds in the gardens, are eaten as vegetables in time of scarcity; the commonest is a kind of Prince of Wales’s feathers (_Amaranthus caudatus_), which when boiled is not unlike spinach. Maize was probably introduced into Africa by the Portuguese, three hundred years ago. The Anyanja would seem to have obtained it from the Yaos, and the Yaos from the coast, if we may judge from the etymology of the name—in both languages, _chimanga_; Manga being the name for the coast. Nearly all Bantu languages have distinct words for it, showing, either that they did not derive it from each other, or that the name did not travel with the thing.