More little bands follow, and settle all along the shore of the Continent. Some of them strike inland, perhaps chased off the coast by others, perhaps finding the food supply too poor where they have landed. One party comes at last to what we now call Mexico.
One day, while the men are off hunting, the children find here and there a plant of wild maize, and bite the juicy grains off the cob. The men come back at night, empty-handed; game is getting scarce. They are glad to eat the corn their children have found. It is good. Later on, when the corn is ripe and hard to chew, some one has a bright idea. I think it must have been a woman, a mother with little children whose teeth cannot chew the hard grains. She spreads a handful of the grains on a flat stone, breaks them up with a stone hammer, and mixes the meal with water, so the little ones have mush to eat. Some of the mush she roasts in lumps. She is the first baker in the new world. Next year another woman, or perhaps it is the same, takes some of the big grains left over, makes a scratch in the earth, and drops them in, so that she can have food close at hand without wandering about to pick the wild ears. She is the first gardener.
Year after year more corn is planted, till there are fields of it. The men still hunt, and leave the farming to their wives, but they are glad to have so much food without hunting. The band does not need to move every time the game is scarce. The people settle down and make a permanent home for themselves. More bands come, and quarrel and fight as savages do,—we all have a good deal of the savage in us even yet,—but the foolishness of it strikes them presently, so a number of bands join to make a tribe. One tribe fights another, but at last several tribes join to make a nation. As food is plentiful, the men have time to think and plan and invent. They mould clay into pottery, and bake it. They twist fibres and spin cotton, though they never happen to think of a spinning wheel. They make looms, and learn weaving. They have no iron, but with stone and copper tools they cut rock and build pyramids, and temples decorated with sculpture. They become expert goldsmiths and silversmiths. They invent a kind of writing, something like that of ancient Egypt.