5 o 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fact that root-crops were not there grown from seeds; and there is a 

 corresponding indication that the knowledge of cereals preceded the 

 domestication of the seed-grown temperate root-crops of the old world, 

 since none of these is anywhere dried, made into starch, or otherwise 

 prepared for storage as the basis of a permanent food-supply of primi- 

 tive tribes. 



That the fruit-eating aborigines of the old world were not equipped 

 for undertaking the use of cereals is further shown by the fact that 

 those who left the moist tropics for the subtropical and temperate 

 regions of Western Asia, North Africa and Europe did not resort, as 

 in America, to the culture of more hardy root crops and cereals, but 

 became pastoral nomads, dependent upon the milk and flesh of their 

 herds, supplemented by such honey, wild fruits and other edible plants 

 as they might encounter in searching for pasture. Dates, figs and other 

 fruit trees might receive some attention from such wanderers, but the 

 more successful they might become as shepherds the less likely they 

 would be to take up the planting of cereals or of other herbaceous crops, 

 which in the absence of fences would be appropriated by their animals 

 before the owners could make even an initial experiment. It is accord- 

 ingly significant that the origin of the agricultures and civilizations 

 of the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates is no longer sought by ethnol- 

 ogists with Semitic shepherds or more northern peoples, but with a sea- 

 faring race which has been traced to southern Arabia, and whose 

 language has been found to have analogies with the ancient Polynesian 

 tongue of Madagascar. 



Summary. 



With the exception of the banana, the cultivated plants which were 

 shared with America by the natives of the islands of the Pacific and 

 of the old world tropics appear to be of American origin, and the 

 wide distribution of these plants in the east and the relatively recent 

 domestication of the old world root crops and cereals accord with the 

 suggestion that the agricultural skill and compact social organization of 

 a primitive American culture race were transferred to southern Asia dur- 

 ing the movements of conquest and colonization which spread the Ma- 

 layo-Polynesian linguistic stock from Hawaii and Easter Island to 

 Madagascar and southern Arabia, but long anterior to existing peoples 

 or languages. The cocoanut which affords so direct an intimation of 

 American origin has already explained the failure of those who have 

 attempted to demonstrate identity of languages, customs and arts on 

 the two sides of the Pacific, but also condemns the equally erroneous 

 attitude of others who refuse, in the absence of such identity, to accept 

 the countless trans-Pacific similarities as indications of affinity or com- 

 mon origin. 



