THE AMERICAN ORIGIN OF AGRICULTURE. 505 



The distribution and uses of the tropical cultivated plants support 

 the belief of ethnologists in the truly indigenous character of the 

 peoples, agricultures and civilizations of the new world, but they also 

 testify to a very early colonization of the islands of the Pacific and 

 Indian oceans from tropical America. The comparative deficiency of 

 the western continent in fruits and animals suitable for food was 

 compensated by numerous starchy root-crops. The primitive culture 

 peoples of the tropical regions of ancient America were accustomed 

 to the cooking, grinding, and storing of vegetable food, and were thus 

 prepared to appreciate and utilize the cereals by agricultural experience 

 lacking among the fruit-eating aborigines of the old world, who devel- 

 oped instead the arts of the chase, the domestication of animals, and the 

 use of milk. But fruit, meat and milk do not complete the agricultural 

 series, and do not include its essential members, since civilizations have 

 nowhere developed without the assistance of the farinaceous root-crops 

 and cereals, the use and cultivation of which are habits acquired by 

 primitive man in America and carried in remote times westward across 

 the Pacific, together with the social organization and constructive arts 

 which appear only in settled communities supported by the tillage of 

 the soil. 



By means of agricultural facts it is possible thus to choose between 

 the rival theories of the ethnologists, and in addition to gain a sugges- 

 tion of the history of agriculture among primitive peoples. If we may 

 not know where man first began to encourage the growth of the plants 

 which furnished his food, we are not without numerous indications 

 that agriculture proper, together with the agricultural organization of 

 human society which lay behind modern civilization, originated in 

 America and has now completed the circuit of the globe. 



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