ON THE MIGRATION OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 327 
Dioscorea is inhame, from which comes the French igname, and from 
that, with Anglo-Saxon brevity, yam. I presume the Spanish name 
to be taken from some American language. In Hindi, the general 
name given to all esculent bulbs and roots is alu. This, Professor 
Wilson tells, us was the name given by those who spoke the Sanskrit 
language to a species of cultivated Arum, and not to the yam, with 
which, as an extratropical people, they must have been unacquainted 
The generic name, alu, with the prefixes phul, a flower, or rath, a 
chariot, are the names by which the Hindus of the north distinguish 
the yam. Not so, however, with the Hindus of the south, in whose 
country the yam is indigenous. As an example, it has in Tamil the 
specific native name kalanyku. 
Like the word alu of the northern Hindus, the word ui, especially 
applied to the yam, is used generically for all esculent roots and bulbs 
by the Malayan nations. It is one of a very wide dissemination, for it 
prevails in not only all the many languages of the Malayan archipelago, 
but has been also extended to the Philippine tongues of a very different 
genius from the Malayan. It has done far more than this, for to the 
east it is found in the languages both of the lank-haired and woolly- 
haired races of the islands of the Pacific, while to the west it has reached 
as far as Madagasear. The original word is of such simple structure that 
it has undergone no other change than the substitution of one labial 
for another, or the elision of its single consonant. Among the insular 
languages there are but few exceptions to this general prevalence, but 
there are a few. In the principal language of the Philippines, and in 
the dialect of the Sandwich Islands, the only one of the Polynesian 
language beyond the northern tropic, we have native names for the 
yam. One species or other of the Dioscorea is, no doubt, indigenous 
in many of these islands of the Malay and Philippine archipelagoes, 
and in those of the Pacific. I saw myself wild yams dug up in 
the woods of an island off the Cape of Cambodia, which, probably 
from the frequency of the wild yam in it, takes its Malay name from 
it, for Pulo-ubi, the island in question, literally rendered, signifies ** isle 
of Yams.” No doubt it would be long used as food in its wild state 
by savage man, and it was probably first cultivated by a people who 
had made the first steps in progress, who would naturally p it its 
now wide-spread name. Who that people was, it is impossible to be 
sure of, but the Malays, or Javanese, as the most advanced and most 
enterprising, are the most probable. 
