THE AMERICAN ORIGIN OF AGRICULTURE. 495 



potatoes and sugar-cane in eastern New Guinea and the adjacent 

 islands, among Polynesian tribes who had never been visited by Euro- 

 peans and who were ignorant of salt, iron and rice. Tobacco was also 

 known among many primitive peoples of the Orient before they came in 

 contact with Europeans, though these and many similar facts have 

 remained obscure because the European discoveries of the East and the 

 West Indies were practically simultaneous. Moreover, nearly a century 

 elapsed between the discovery of America and the realization that it 

 was indeed a new world and not merely an eastward prolongation of 

 Asia, so that the community of food plants did not at first appear 

 remarkable. 



The Agriculture of Ancient America. 



The most important food-plants of the Polynesians were seven in 

 number, the taro, yam,* sweet potato, sugar-cane, banana, breadfruit 

 and cocoanut, of which six, or all except the breadfruit, existed in pre- 

 Spanish America, and of these, five, or all except the cocoanut, were 

 propagated only from cuttings. 



From the botanical standpoint the breadfruit is as distinctly Asiatic 

 as the cocoanut is American, but although many seedless varieties of 

 the breadfruit were distributed among the eastern archipelagos of 

 Polynesia, these did not reach America until introduced by Captain 

 Blieh in 1793, while the cocoanut must have crossed the Pacific thou- 

 sands of years before, in order to give time for the development of the 

 numerous and very distinct varieties cultivated in the Malay region. 

 Except with the banana, botany gives much evidence for and none 

 against the new world origin of the food plants shared by ancient 

 America with Polynesia and the tropics of the old world, though few 

 of them are known under conditions which warrant a belief that they 

 now exist anywhere in a truly wild state. The partial or complete 

 seedlessness attained by several of the important species also indicates 

 dependence upon human assistance in propagation for a very long 

 period of time, and precludes all rational doubt that their wide dissemi- 

 nation was accomplished through the direct agency of primitive man. 



Ethnologists will not deny that in the old world this distribution 

 was the work of the ancestors of the Polynesians, who have been traced 

 from Hawaii and Easter Island to Madagascar, and even across the 

 African Continent. f We have not, however, been provided with any 

 explanation of the existence of these food plants in America, for it is 



* Many species of true yams (Dioscorea) are cultivated, and the roots of 

 numerous wild species are collected for food in various parts of the Tropics. 

 The present reference is to D. alata, the most widely distributed of the domesti- 

 cated species, and not known in the wild state. 



Frobenius, Zeitscli. der Gesellsch. fur Erdkunde zu Berlin, Bd. 33, 1898. 

 Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1898, pp. 637-650. 



