A negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated wheat in New Spain, from three seeds which he found amongst some rice brought from Spain for the use of the troops. In the Franciscan convent at Quito I saw, preserved as a relic, the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sowed in Quito by the Franciscan monk, Fray Jodoco Rixi de Gante, a native of Ghent in Flanders. The first crop was raised in front of the convent, on the “Plazuela de S. Francisco,” after the wood which then extended from the foot of the Volcano of Pichincha had been cleared. The monks, whom I frequently visited during my stay at Quito, begged me to explain the inscription on the cup, which according to their conjecture contained some hidden allusion to wheat. On examining the vessel, I read in old German the words “Let him who drinks from me, ne’er forget his God.” This old German drinking cup excited in me feelings of veneration! Would that everywhere in the New Continent the names of those were preserved who, instead of devastating the soil by bloody conquests, confided to it the first fruits of Ceres! There are “fewer examples of a general affinity of names in terms relating to the different species of corn and objects of agriculture than to the rearing of cattle. Herdsmen when they migrated to other regions had still much in common, while the subsequent cultivators of the soil had to invent special words. But the fact that in comparison with the Sanscrit, Romans and Greeks seem to stand on the same footing with Germans and Slavonians, speaks in favour of the very early contemporaneous emigration of the two latter. Yet the Indian _java_ (_frumentum hordeum_), when compared with the Lithuanian _jawai_, and the Finnish _jywa_, affords a striking exception.”[GG] Footnote 28: p. 11.—“_Preferring to keep within a cooler climate._” Throughout the whole of Mexico and Peru we find the trace of human civilisation confined to the elevated table-lands. We saw the ruins of palaces and baths on the sides of the Andes, at an elevation of from 10,230 to 11,510 feet. None but northern tribes migrating from the north towards the equator could have remained from preference in such a climate. Footnote 29: p. 12.—“_The history of the peopling of Japan._”