492 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE AMERICAN ORIGIN OF AGRICULTURE. 



By O. F. COOK, 



U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



A GRICULTURAL science so generally appears as a borrower from 

 ^--^- physics, chemistry, botany or zoology that it has not been ex- 

 pected to furnish facts of use in other lines of investigation. Thus, 

 although it has been known since the sixteenth century that the same 

 series of food plants extended throughout the tropics of both 

 hemispheres, the significance of this is still unappreciated, and ethnol- 

 ogists are still doubtful regarding prehistoric communication across the 

 Pacific. Stranded Japanese junks, Buddhist missionaries, Alaskan land 

 connection and other possibilities of contact have been gravely and 

 minutely discussed while unequivocal evidence of extensive early inter- 

 course lay only too obviously at hand. 



The history of agriculture shows a conservatism probably unequaled 

 in any phase of human activity. Not only has no important food plant 

 been domesticated in historic times, but even in the most enlightened 

 communities changes in the culture and use of the food plants and 

 products to which our physical constitutions and domestic customs 

 have become adapted take place with extreme slowness except as they 

 accompany movements of colonization. Remembering this strict self- 

 limitation of man to traditional food materials, it becomes obvious that 

 the possession of the same seedless plants, such as the yam, sweet potato, 

 taro, sugar-cane and banana by the primitive peoples of the islands of 

 the Pacific, as well as by those of the adjacent shores of Asia and 

 America, indicates, with attendant facts, not only an older communica- 

 tion, but an intimate contact or community of origin of the agricul- 

 tural civilizations of the lands adjacent to the Pacific and Indian 

 Oceans. 



The Useful Plants of the Pacific Islands. 



Notwithstanding the immense distances by which the tropical 

 islands of the Pacific are separated from the continents and from each 

 other, European discoverers found them already occupied by an adven- 

 turous sea-faring people who knew enough astronomy to navigate their 

 frail canoes in these vast expanses of ocean without the assistance of 

 the mariner's compass. The agriculture of the Polynesians was, how- 

 ever, no less wonderful than their seamanship, and was certainly not 

 less important to them, since the coral islands of the Pacific are not 



