Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WILD SEEDS OF FOOD VALUE, AND HOW THEY HAVE BEEN UTILIZED The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush Lays her full mess before you. Shakespeare. THE Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru brought to the knowledge of the white race a number of vegetable foods that are to-day on every American table—such as Indian corn, the potato, the pepper, and certain varieties of beans. Others are still unknown to the world at large. Among the latter that Cortes found in every-day use in Mexico was a square-stemmed, blue-flowered herb, which the chroniclers of that -time called Chian or Chia. It seems to have ranked in popularity with staples like maize, frijoles, maguey, cacao and chili; and was grown with these in the fields and floating gardens of the Aztecs, for the sake of the small but numerous nutritious seeds of a pleasant, nutty flavor. Writers on the products of the New Worldin the first couple of centuries of the Spanish domination always speak of Chia with respect. Later, when upper California came in for settlement, the diarist of Portola's "expedition to 'the Bay of San Francisco specifies it as among the gifts offered by the Indians to their white visitors; and archaeologists, grubbing in prehistoric graves in Southern California, have turned up deposits of the seed left as viaticum of departed souls, which attest the antiquity of its use within the limits of the United States. Even to-day, shopkeepers in the Spanish quarters of our own Southwestern cities as well as street venders in the towns of Mexico include Chia as part of their stock in trade. One wonders what this all but forgotten food can be. It is the name applied to at least five or six distinct species of plants, of somewhat different aspects, most of them belonging to the genus Salvia....