The Domestication of the African AntelopeAuthor(s): Science ServiceSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1938), p. 338Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/16710 .

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338 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

Japan in fact produces about 95 per cent. of the world's pyrethrum, and the United States, usinog some 20,000,000 pounds a year, is half of the world mar- ket. In Japan, pyrethrum is comparable with cotton in the southern states as a cash crop.

A report in Indutstrial and Engineer- irng Chemistry -on the Kenya pyrethrum plantings and harvest shows that the little flowers of Africali cultivation are superior, in their potency, to the Japa- nese variety. While pyrethrum plants have been grown in many parts of the world-California, Lancaster, Pa., and Colorado are three American examples -it is only in Kenya that a product superior to that of Japan is obtained.

Although the United States uses large amounts of pyrethrum it is unlikely, in the near future, that it can be grown economically here in competition with foreign lands. The pyrethrum flowers are picked by hand and the cheap labor of Japan and Africa has the situation well under commaild.

THE DOMESTICATION OF THE AFRICAN ANTELOPE

Farmers in Africa may some day be able to harness big antelopes to their plows, and have their meat to eat and their hides to make into harness and boots. Domestication of the eland, an antelope bigger than most oxen, is sug- gested by Professor Caesar R. Boettger, of the University of Berlin, as a possible solution to Africa's cattle-pest problem.

The tsetse fly, Africa's most dreaded insect, is making parts of the continent uninhabitable because it carries the germs of a disease deadly to domestic cattle and other live stock of non-African origin. It deprives the natives of their chief form of wealth and makes farming impossible to white settlers.

The native fauna of Africa are not totally immune to the tsetse-borne dis- ease, ngana, but they are highly resistant

to it. They survive when ugana wipes out whole herds of domestic cattle.

The chief obstacle to be overcome in using the eland or some other member of Africa's rich population of large hoofed animals is their alleged untam- ability. None of them has ever beenl domesticated in modern times.

However, Professor Boettger believes that the difficulty lies not so much in the psychology of the animals as in that of the natives. They have just never taken the trouble to try, he thinks, and he points out the success of the Belgian efforts in the Congo, in making good work-animals out of the supposedly untamable Africali species of elephant.

Once in the remote history of Africa antelopes were kept in man-tended herds, Professor Boettger states. Monuments of the oldest dynasties in Egypt show herds of three antelope species kept within enclosures. Antelope-keeping be- came a lost art, however, long before the end of aintiquity in Egypt; perhaps because imported cattle were easier to manage and more profitable.

Immediate success could not be looked for, perhaps. But, probably, our Neo- lithic ancestors had to work on cattle, horses and other animals for many gen- erations before they became tractable and really worth their keep.

THE ORIGIN OF CORN Corn has long been one of the greatest

of botanical riddles. Nobody has known where it came from. Wild forms of most other grains are known, but corn has remained a botanical orphan. Not only does it lack any identified ancestors, but it has only two cousins in the West- ern Hemisphere: teosinte, which is a Mexican fodder plant, and a wild grass named Tripsacum.

Now come two Texas scientists, Dr. P. C. Mangelsdorf and Professor R. G. Reeves, with strong evidence that the ancestor of corn is corn-a primitive type of grain known as pod corn, in

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