57 



All this evidence points to the peopling of this continent at a very 

 remote time, perhaps as far back rs the close of the Glacial Epoch; 

 and it also indicates that the early progenitors of our Indian tribes 

 had left their original homes in the Old World before any of the 

 linguistic Old World stocks had taken shaj)e; before Sanscrit was 

 Sanscrit; before the languages of China or any other Asiatic jieople 

 had become established; and just as in this hemisphere tli.e natives de- 

 veloped their own languages from the most primitive elements of sjieech. 

 so most certainly did they develo]) their agriculture from the wild 

 plants of the fields, the'swamps, the hillsides, and the forests. In both 

 respects, as I have already jiointed out, they differed from the Poly 

 nesians who brought with them to their island homes not only their 

 language but their agriculture, from the cradle of their race in the 

 Malay Archipelago; cuttings of seedless breadfruit and of sugarcane, 

 fleshy roots of taro and yams; even trees, like the Indian almond and 

 the candlenut. 



Here I would like to point out to the members of the Nut Growers' 

 Association the chief difference between nuts and other food staples. 

 Nearly all of our cultivated vegetables, including mai/e, beans, pota- 

 toes, sweet potatoes, squashes and pumjikins, are annuals, sensitive 

 to frost, which must be raised from seed each year, and which differ 

 so greatly from the primitive plants from which they came that their 

 ancestr;l formis cannot be definitely determined. Most of these vege- 

 tables are in all probability of hybrid origin, the result of cross polina- 

 tion and selection. In the case of our native nuts the conditions are 

 (]iiite different. We know the original ancestor of the pecan, our 

 hickories and our walnuts. The fiiu- varieties now cultivated are not 

 hybrids but have been selected Iroin wild trees. In connection with 

 nuts I would also jjoint out that in all prob.ability they were the most 

 important food-staple of ])rimitive man, as well as of his simian an- 

 cestors. It required no great intelligence to gather them or to store 

 them after the fashion followed by scpiirrels. Intelligence, however, is 

 required to ])l.int nuts and to transplant nut trees. Still greater in- 

 telligence is involved in the process of preparing certain nuts for food. 

 A delicious creamy emulsion, for inst.ince. was prepared by the Vir- 

 ginian Iiulians from hickory nuts. Cracking- them and removing the 

 kernels was too long and tedious an operation; so they developed a 

 method of gathering them in (|uaiitities and crushing them in a hol- 

 lowed log, together with water, pounding them to a paste and then 



