The Plant World 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POPULAR BOTANY 



Official Organ of 

 The Wild Flower Preservation Society 



of America 



Vol. VI SEPTEMBER, 1903 No. 9 



The Breadfruit. 



By Henry E. Baum. 



The breadfruit tree has for over a century occupied a unique position 

 in the vegetable kingdom. Its farinaceous fruit serves the Pacific 

 Islanders in lieu of the wheaten loaf of the western hemisphere, and along 

 with the taro, yam, and banana furnishes the daily food of Oceanica. 

 When the pioneer Europeans in the Pacific began to find cluster after 

 cluster of tropical islands full of new things of ethnological and biological 

 interest, nothing more worthy of mention was seen than this new fruit, or 

 rather vegetable, which was produced in abundance practically all the 

 year with no cultural effort on the part of the native beyond the original 

 planting. From the time of its earliest authenticated mention it became 

 an object of curiosity and inquiry, until as an indirect result of Captain 

 Cook's splendid efforts between 1769 and 1777 in charting the unknown 

 ocean an expedition was sent out by the English crown to obtain this 

 valuable food-staple for his majesty's most loyal West Indian subjects. 

 The mutiny of the Bounty, with the subsequent founding of the Utopian 

 community on Pitcairn's Island by the reformed mutineer Adams, was 

 the result of this first attempt at introduction into the American tropics ; 

 but success was spelled a few years later when Bligh, who also commanded 

 the former expedition, made the trip safely from Tahiti in the Society 

 Islands to St. Vincent and Jamaica in the West Indies, with a cargo of 

 the precious trees. The existence of a record of a still earlier, but half- 

 forgotten, introduction of the seeded fruit into the West Indies through a 



