5Q2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



houses and towns being relegated to waste places. The temperate food 

 plants of Peru and China are all apparently indigenous to their respect- 

 ive continents. They testify to the independent development of the 

 temperate agricultures of the two regions, but it seems certain that 

 both were the successors of more tropical starch-eating populations, 

 parts of which had been crowded back to the relatively inhospitable 

 plateaus of Peru and Bolivia, and to the bleak plains of northern China, 

 where the primitive tropical root-crops were, of necessity, replaced by 

 more hardy indigenous species. The Chibcha people of the interior of 

 Colombia attained a considerable degree of advancement without adopt- 

 ing a single domestic animal. The Peruvians and Chinese learned to 

 use beasts of burden and animal fibers and skins, but their pastoral 

 efforts were merely incidental to agriculture; they remained essentially 

 vegetarians, eating little meat, and never taking up the use of milk. 



The Domestication of the Banana. 



In further support of the suggestion that the use of the starch- 

 producing root-crops is a distinctively American development of primi- 

 tive agriculture is the fact that the tropics of the old world contributed 

 no important cultivated plant of this class, and none which gives evi- 

 dence of long domestication. On the other hand, such regions as Mada- 

 gascar and East Africa, where Polynesians are now supposed by 

 ethnologists to have settled in ' remote prehistoric times, ' continued the 

 culture and differentiation of the varieties of the taro and the sweet 

 potato, and were agriculturally mere outposts of the American tropics. 



The presence of the banana might be thought to explain the rela- 

 tively small importance of root-crops in the old world, since it furnishes 

 with far less effort of cultivation and preparation a highly nutritious 

 and palatable food. It appears, however, that the use of root-crops 

 must have preceded the domestication of the banana, for although the 

 peed-bearing wild bananas are utterly worthless as fruits and hence 

 would not have been domesticated as such, nevertheless more species 

 of them than of any other genus of food plants were brought into culti- 

 vation. The clue to this paradox is afforded by the fact that bananas 

 are still cultivated as root crops in the old world tropics, particularly 

 in New Caledonia and Abyssinia.* 



* The suggestion that the primitive culture race which domesticated the 

 banana came from America also receives definite support from the fact that an 

 American plant (Heliconia bihai), somewhat similar to the banana but without 

 an edible fruit, reached the islands of the Pacific in prehistoric times. Though 

 no longer cultivated by the Polynesians, it has become established in the moun- 

 tains of Samoa and in many of the more western archipelagos. In New Cale- 

 donia the tough leaves are still woven into hats, but the Pandanus, native in 

 the Malay region, affords a better material for general purposes and has dis- 



