330 MEETING OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
nesian language, for we have it in the Tonga as me and marnai, in the 
Tahiti as vavo, and in the Owyhee as uu. 
I shall conclude with a few general observations on the relative value 
of the plants enumerated by me, in so far as regards their influence on 
social progress. Of these, incomparably the most valuable to man are 
the cereals. They are the most agreeable and the most wholesome, while 
they contain the greatest amount of nutriment in the smallest bulk. 
Their culture, moreover, demands a greater amount of skill and labour 
than the lower kinds of bread ; and this is a quality belonging to them 
which, as it stimulates industry and ingenuity, is, in a social view, of 
high value. It is useful that several of these cereals should be culti- 
vated together, so that, in the event of the failure of one or two, there 
should remain others to fall back upon. It must be admitted, how- 
ever, that, although the culture of several different cereals together may 
mitigate, it cannot prevent either dearths or famines, since the same 
drought or blight may, more or less, affect all of them. India, for 
example, in which a greater variety of cereals is cultivated than in 
Europe, has, nevertheless, been visited within the last hundred years 
with many dearths and several great famines, owing to the absence of 
the means of supplying the deficiency of one part of it by the super- 
abundance of another. An easy and cheap intercourse between the 
different provinces of a country and its free commercial intercourse 
with foreign countries possessing climates different from its own, are 
the only certain guarantees against scarcities and famines. These 
conditions, however, can exist only in the most advanced states of 
society, and are wholly absent in the early and rude stages of it, to 
which the present discussion refers. 
It may be safely asserted that no people ever attained a tolerable de- 
gree of civilization who did not cultivate one or other of the higher 
cereals. The architectural monuments and the letters of Egypt, of an- 
cient Greece and of Italy, of Assyria, of Northern India, and of North- 
ern China, were all produced by consumers of wheat. The monu- 
ments and letters of Southern India, of the Hindu-Chinese countries, 
of Southern China, of Java, and of Sumatra, were the products of a 
rice-cultivating and rice-consuming people. The architectural mo- 
numents of Mexico and Peru, and, we have no doubt, also of Pa- 
lenque, were produced by the cultivators and consumers of m 
No cultivators and consumers of roots or fruits, it may ^ pu 
` 
