6 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



natives possessed rude earthenware, but elsewhere in Poly- 

 nesia eastward of Fiji pottery at that time was unknown ; 

 hence the questions naturally arise, Was the art lost, or was 

 it ever introduced ? Unlike the Australian aborigines, the 

 inhabitants of New Zealand and Polynesia perfectly under- 

 stood the use of boiling water in cookery ; it seems, therefore, 

 incredible that such a simple and useful art was allowed to 

 perish where there was abundance of material, and that all 

 the widely-scattered sections of the Pacific nations relapsed 

 to the rude and tedious method of boiling by means of heated 

 stones. These questions can only be satisfactorily settled by 

 the careful examination of middens and the sites of ancient 

 settlements. In the north temperate zone rude hunting 

 peoples, unacquainted with the use of metals, manufactured 

 very serviceable articles of clay;''' it is therefore difficult to 

 understand the backward state of the art in many of the 

 Malay Islands withm a very recent period, unless we can 

 suppose that the various substitutes for pottery which the 

 vegetable kingdom afforded, such as the bamboo, cocoanut 

 shells, and calabashes, checked its development. 



KuMAKA, or Sweet Potato {Convolvulus batatas). — From 

 an historical point of view this is the most important plant 

 cultivated by the inhabitants of New Zealand and Polynesia. 

 When Columbus discovered the West Indian Islands he found a 

 svk-eet potato there in cultivation, and transported it to Spain, 

 from whence it spi'ead to the Philippines, where it received 

 the name " Castilian yam." The rapid dissemination of 

 the C. batatas and other New- World species, such as the 

 manioc, maize, and tobacco, amongst the agricultural nations 

 of Africa, before either Arabs or Europeans penetrated into 

 their countries, might lead to the supposition that the pre- 

 sence of the kmnara in Polynesia only dated from the time of 

 the American discovery. But we have the positive evidence 

 furnished by Cook that, when he rediscovered New Zealand, 

 and discovered the Hawaiian Archipelago in 1778, the kuniara 

 was the cultivated plant on which the inhabitants chiefly 

 depended for food. As neither the New-Zealanders nor the 

 Hawaiians had at that time any intercourse with the outer 

 world, or any definite knowledge of places or people beyond 

 their respective groups, it was impossible for them to have 

 obtained the kumara in the same manner as the negro tribes. 



From the close resemblance of the name cumar, by which 

 the sweet potato was known in Quito when the Spaniards 

 conquered that country, to the various Polynesian names, 

 kiimara, umara, gumara, kc, it has been suggested that the 

 plant found its way into the Pacific directly from South 



* " Antiquity of Man." Sir C. Lyell. 



