China Corn.

While these have been feeding for thousands of years the people of the dry regions of Africa and Arabia, the no less ancient, and, in agriculture, more skillful millions of the dry regions of Central and Northern China have been cultivating the same plant, and from their superior culture and selection of seed and grown in their shorter seasons it now conies to us as an improved and earlier, better-yielding variety. Botanists have given it the distinction of a separate variety under the name of sorghum halapense. Rev. A. Wylie, D. D., in his article on China in the new American Cyclopedia, vol. iv, page 445, speaks of it under the name of "Millet," as the chief crop of the great plains of China; and from two years experience in raising it in California, I can positively assert that its growth here equals that of its native country. A hundred million people have eaten it to-day, will eat it all the days of their lives as their chief article of food.