BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 27, 1939 _ Vol. 7, No. 7 
THE NOMENCLATURE OF THE 
TARO AND ITS VARIETIES 
BY 
Albert F. Hill 
The Taro, one of the oldest of cultivated plants, 
like other species of great antiquity has become wide¬ 
spread and exceedingly variable during its long history. 
Numerous varieties and hundreds of horticultural races 
have been developed under cultivation and these have 
received little or no systematic attention. This is parti¬ 
cularly true in the Pacific Islands where taro constitutes 
one of the staple foods of the native peoples and each 
island or group of islands has developed its own inde¬ 
pendent races. Moreover, a difference of opinion exists 
among systematic botanists as to the number of species 
involved in this large assemblage of plants known vari¬ 
ously as taros, dasheens, eddoes, coco-yams, malangas, 
tanyahs, culcas, elephant ears, Chinese potatoes and many 
other vernacular names. Although much remains to be 
done before the true relationships can be cleared up, 
certain general facts are available. 
In the Species Plantarum (1753) Linnaeus described 
two types of taro to which he gave the names Arum 
Colocasia and Arum esculentum. In 1832 Schott (in Schott 
and Endlicher Meletemata Botanica) established the 
genus Colocasia and transferred to it the two Lmnaean 
species as Colocasia antiquorum and C. esculenta respec- 
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