ON THE MIGRATION OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 317 
On THE MIGRATION OF CULTIVATED PLANTS IN REFERENCE TO 
ErHNoLocy. By John Crawfurd, F.R.S. 
The migration of cultivated plants is wholly the work of man, and 
its history, therefore, a legitimate branch of ethnology. In so far as 
vegetable substance is concerned, the earliest food of man, on his first 
appearance on earth, must of necessity have consisted of wild fruits 
and roots, wild corns and wild pulses, and these would certainly be 
more abundant than we now find them. The plants resorted to for 
this purpose would necessarily vary with climate. In temperate re- 
gions, the seeds of spontaneous grasses and pulses, and of a few ma- 
rine plants, with acorns and honey, would be had recourse to. In 
tropical and subtropical regions, the available vegetable food of the 
early savage would consist of the date, the cocoa-nut, wild cereals, 
the yam, and other spontaneous roots. 
Some races of man are still found in the primitive condition thus 
described. The natives of Australia, to this day, cultivate no plant, 
and have no other vegetable food than a few wild roots. The natives 
of the Andaman Islands have for their vegetable food only a coarse 
wild bean, and the still coarser fruit of the mangrove. In a similar 
condition are the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the Eskuimos. 
Even of the nomadic tribes of Northern Arabia, the chief vegetable 
food, down to the present day, consists of two wild uncultivated plants, 
called in the Arabic language sambh and mesda, but the technieal de- 
nominations of which have not been determined. Speaking of the 
first of these, Palgrave says :—* The ripening season is in July, when 
old and young, men and women, are all out to collect the unsown and 
untoiled-for harvest.” 
In America, from Canada to Florida, there grows in marshy land, 
on the banks of lakes and rivers, a species of grass, the seeds of which 
yield a nutritious corn similar, but inferior, to the millets of the Old 
World. This, in one of the prevalent American languages, is called 
the ¢uscarora (Zizania aquatica). Although capable of cultivation, it 
has never been so, the superior maize having most probably sed 
with the necessity for it. It is, however, used as a food by the wan- 
dering American tribes, as the two plants named in the last paragraph 
are by the Bedouins. In Southern Africa, the fruit of a species of 
wild gourd, called the nara, about the size of a cocoa-nut, is used as 
food by the natives, who, when it is ripe, repair periodically to the 
plains where it grows, to feast upon it. 
