EuTLAND. — History of the Pacific. 49 



spreading when Europeans came upon the scenes ; ah-eady 

 agriculture had made its way into the forest country of 

 Brazil, '■= amongst the West Indian Islands, and across the 

 continent as far northward as the Great Lakes. f In its 

 northern extension it was only supplementary to hunting; 

 nor had it been adapted to the exigencies of the climate, the 

 plants of the warmer zone being alone in cultivation. 



These differences between the New World and the Old 

 World seem capable of only one explanation : The civilization 

 of Central America was the result of colonisation by peoples 

 farther advanced than the aboriginal race. 



Eeturning to the Pacific, we have seen that the widely- 

 scattered islands of eastern Polynesia and the New Zealand 

 Archipelago had all been regularly colonised. It is impossible 

 to believe that a people who made their way eastward from 

 Malaya until they reached the Hawaiian Group in the north, 

 and Easter Island in the south, would halt until they found 

 the boundary of the great ocean, or that, having set foot on 

 the continent, they would fail to do as they had elsewhere 

 done, establish a settlement. If the civilization of America 

 thus commenced, it might be supposed that in the arts and 

 institutions of Peru and Mexico there would have been more 

 traces of its origin. When we consider how extremely 

 adaptive the colonising people were, the number of indigenous 

 plants they had brought into cultivation throughout Polynesia 

 and New Zealand ; how, in the Southern Archipelago, they had 

 adapted their mode of cultivating the taro, and had modified 

 their clothing to suit the climate ; and that, availing themselves 

 of the large timber the islands furnished, they had abandoned 

 the outi'igger canoe, thus fulfilling an ancient Tahitian pro- 

 phecy ; when we take all this into account we readily per- 

 ceive that amidst the productions of the great continent, 

 and surrounded by an alien race, their arts, customs, and in- 

 stitutions would in time be so altered as to be unrecognisable. 



Of the six most important esculents cultivated in Poly- 

 nesia, the breadfruit could not have been grown on the wes- 

 tern American seaboard. The cocoanut was wild on the 

 islands off Panama. Yams and calabashes were generally 

 cultivated by all the agricultural nations within whose do- 

 main they would grow. The banana was probably growing 

 in Peru, though its limited extension is difficult to account 

 for. There remains, then, only the taro which might have been 

 advantageously introduced. 



Considering how the indigenous cultivated plants of the 

 New World have, since their dispersal, affected the agriculture 



* " Personal Narrative of Travels." Humboldt, 

 t " The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley." Lucien Garr. 

 4 



