Then it caught on as a food in Italy and by the start of the 19th century was being grown on a field scale. So far as known, it was absent from the gardens of Colonial America, unless as a rare ornamental plant. Not until the middle of the 19th century was it reintroduced to its native western hemisphere as a food crop. For a long time it acquired no great popularity. A few vines in the family garden were considered enough, since there was no tomato market. A U. S. Department of Agriculture report calls the tomato “the prodigy of the vegetable world.” Its present success is due in large part to the discovery of vitamins. Although used as a food for little more than a century it now is almost as widely distributed as wheat, a food plant which has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years. Today the tomato crop covers about a half million acres in the U. S. alone. This crop consists of more than 20,000,000 bushels of fresh tomatoes and more than 300,000 tons of canned products. There are now about 150 known varieties, adapted to all sorts of purposes. _The Holiest Place on Earth_ The summit of Adam’s Peak in south-central Ceylon, wrapped perpetually in priestly robes of grey clouds, is one of the holy places of the earth. There, through many centuries, the prayers of millions belonging to warring creeds have worn thin the curtain between the effable and the ineffable. It is a shrine of four of the world’s great religions. In the rock is a depression that looks like a giant’s footprint. Hindus believe it was made by snake-haired Siva, the destroyer. Moslems say it is the footprint of the first man, Adam, who was exiled to this mountaintop after he was thrown out of Paradise. Buddhists believe that it could have been made only by the great Gautama. Nestorian Christians maintain that it is a relic of the disciple Thomas, who brought the gospel of Christ into the East. To this spot, braving the road through leech-infested forests below and the perilous ascent along gale-swept ledges, have come generation after generation of devout pilgrims to voice a common prayer in different tongues through different intermediaries. The pilgrim, standing by the footprint of Adam, looks down upon the forest-covered hills to the eastward. Over all the land spreads the grey shadow of the supernatural. Below him is one of the most imposing spectacles on earth—the middle slopes scarlet with the blossoms of dense forests of gigantic rhododendrons, the deep-blue patches of mountain lakes, and canyons which no human has entered—their mysterious depths hidden by wind-tossed fog. Great waterfalls roar over vine-covered cliffs. Strange sounds arise from jungles of white-stemmed palms. It is a wild land of ghosts and demons watched over by the holy mountains.