THE AMERICAN ORIGIN OF AGRICULTURE. 499 



plant among the tropical peoples excludes also the suggestion of any 

 recent introduction from Polynesia of the taro or other root-crops 

 which the Pacific peoples shared with the American. 



Indeed, it is not unreasonable to believe that the taro, like the closely 

 similar aroids of the genus Xanthosoma, was domesticated somewhere 

 about the shores of the Caribbean Sea, where it has a large variety of 

 native names in contrast to the single designation applied to it by the 

 Polynesians. In Porto Eico, where the highest aboriginal culture of 

 the West Indies was attained,* four aroids had the same generic name, 

 yautia, which was adopted by the Spanish settlers. Strangely enough 

 it is only with the taro, yautia malanga, that the native specific term 

 has been preserved, three species of Xanthosoma having now only Span- 

 ish adjectives, yautia olanca, yautia amarilla and yautia palma. Bot- 

 anists have never expressed a doubt that the species of Xanthosoma, 

 some of which are known only in cultivation, originated in the West 

 Indies and the adjacent parts of South America, and as these seem to- 

 be preferred to the taro, we must either look upon the latter as also- 

 indigenous in the West Indies or explain its presence by a movement 

 from the mainland analogous to that which could have carried the same 

 taro and numerous other American plants into the Pacific. Taro seems 

 to have been the only cultivated aroid of the region of Panama whence 

 some ethnologists have derived the sea-faring cannibals, the Caribs. 

 To believe that the taro furnished the suggestion for the utilization 

 of the Xanthosomas and also for that of Alocasia, Amorphopliallus, 

 Cyrtosperma and other aroids indigenous to the East Indies, seems far 

 less irrational than to suppose that the strange habit of eating these 

 painfully unpalatable plants originated independently in numerous 

 primitive communities. 



From Root-Crops to Cereals. 



While it is, of course, not certain that the preparation of the starchy 

 root-crops constituted the first regular application of fire to vegetable 

 food, it is apparent that meal-eaters would be in a much better position 

 than fruit-eaters or meat-eaters to attack the final problem of primitive 

 agriculture, the use of cereals. Without the winter protection which 

 primitive man could not supply, the culture of cassava and other trop- 



* Botanists have found that the native names of plants are more numerous 

 and are used with more precision in Porto Rico than elsewhere in the West 

 Indies. The common opinion that the aborigines of this island were extermi- 

 nated by the Spaniards is evidently quite erroneous. In the mountainous inte- 

 rior district there are thousands of people who have no negro admixture and who 

 are accordingly enumerated in the census as whites, but who are Spaniards only 

 in language and in the wearing of cotton prints. Their agriculture, architecture 

 and domestic economy show little foreign influence, and there is no reason for 

 believing that these natives differ seriously from their pre-Columbian ancestors. 



