PLANTS AND THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA. 79 



where it certainly does not grow in the wild state ? It must be remem- 

 bered that the plantain is a tree-like herbaceous plant possessing no 

 easily transportable bulbs like the potato or the dahlia, nor propagable 

 by cuttings like the willow or the poplar. It has only a perennial root 

 which, once planted, needs hardly any care, and yet produces the most 

 abundant crop of any known tropical plant. On the average, a plantain 

 annually bears nearly twenty kilogrammes, and sometimes a hundred- 

 weight, of most nutritious fruit, which at the same time possesses a deli- 

 cious flavor. The stem then dies and the root gives out new shoots. 

 No doubt the American race, closely allied as it is with the Mongolian, 

 carried with it, when it migrated to America, the plantain as a culti- 

 vated plant from Asia where it grew wild. The plantain cannot have 

 come from Africa or from Polynesia, where musa is also indigenous, for 

 in that case African or Polynesian characters would exist in the abo- 

 riginal population of America. Some writers have supposed that this 

 seedless, herbaceous, cultivated plant must have been introduced into 

 America by shipwrecked seamen, because it can exist only in a tropical 

 climate and in living specimens. But in our geological epoch a party 

 of Mongolians shipwrecked in their primitive craft could never have 

 reached the shores of America alive * at any point in the tropical zone, 

 for they would be unprovided with sufficient food, and because the trop- 

 ical distance between Asia and America is enormous, nearly thrice or 

 four times as great as between Europe and America. Then, seamen 

 are not wont to take living specimens of the plantain on their voyages ; 

 and, even if they did, these plants would be consumed as food in case of 

 shipwreck. 



Even if we suppose the plants to have escaped this fate, they would 

 surely perish for want of fresh water. An hypothesis which rests on 

 four improbabilities is worth nothing, and we might wager one against 

 thousands of millions that no importation of the plantain into America 

 has ever happened in that wise. The only hypothesis which remains 

 is, that the importation took place while the polar regions enjoyed a 

 tropical climate, and that the plantain was brought by the immigrating 

 Asiatics by way of Kamtchatka and Alaska. This is the more prob- 

 able, because many other tropical cultivated plants are in like manner 

 propagated, not by seeds, but by " eyes," etc. Now, a cultivated plant 

 which does not possess seeds must have been under culture for a very 

 long period — we have not in Europe a single exclusively seedless, 

 berry-bearing, cultivated plant — and hence it is perhaps fair to infer 

 that these plants were cultivated as early as the beginning of the mid- 

 dle of the diluvial period. Moreover, the hypothesis of an immigration 



' The Chinese and Japanese are acquainted with the plantain, and possess large ships 

 in which pretty long voyages may be made. In the summer the plantain might live in the 

 temperate zone. It can hardly be doubted that long before Columbus's time the junks 

 of those peoples may have been wrecked on the Pacific coast of America. This seems 

 an objection to the author's views. — Translator. 



