The Plant World 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POPULAR BOTANY 



Official Organ of 

 The Wild Flower Preservation Society 



OF America 



VoL VI OCTOBER, 1903 No. 10 



The Breadfruit.— II 



By Henry E. Baum. 



The breadfruit is a common tree in the Malay Archipelago, having its 

 original home, according to De Candolle, in the Sunda Islands, the group 

 having Sumatra at its western end and Timor at its eastern, or in the 

 Moluccas, which lie to the northeast of this group. The sterile variety 

 is to be found side by side with the seeded in this labyrinth of islands, 

 and the tree has been reported by Rumphius as growing wild on some of 

 the Sunda Islands. The seedless variety was, however, carried to the 

 Pacific islands at an early date, and when the first Europeans made their 

 way into the South Sea it was found under cultivation on all the islands 

 from the Malay Archipelago to the Marquesas group and from the Eow 

 Archipelago in the southern hemisphere to the Hawaiian Islands in the 

 northern. The open-boat journeys of the Polynesians in their peopling 

 of the Pacific islands are marvelous from the point of view of seamanship 

 alone, but become even more wonderful when the record of their agricul- 

 tural introductions is considered. Probably a hundred species of plants 

 were introduced into Hawaii by the Polynesians, and as a majority of their 

 principal food-producing plants were propagated by cuttings alone, the 

 difficulty in successfully carrying them across a wide expanse of ocean 

 in open boats is obvious. 



The tree has at present, however, a cosmopolitan distribution in the 

 tropics as the result of the introductions and care of civilized man. 



