412 A NATURALIST IN THE PACIFIC CHAP. 



Man and the seed have battled their way over the Pacific 

 apparently in defiance of the prevailing winds and currents, 

 and both have failed to reach the New World. Man in the 

 Pacific is almost as enigmatical as the plant. As a denizen of 

 this region he is by no means a recent introduction ; and though 

 his food-plants are mainly Asiatic, they belong to distinct ages in 

 the history of man's occupation of these islands. 



I venture to think that a great deal lies behind the Indo- 

 Malayan mask of the Polynesian, and that there is a story concerned 

 with his origin that has yet to be told. We have by no means 

 solved the riddle when by following the evidence we assign to him 

 a home in Asia. It is only then that the real difficulties begin. It 

 required many centuries of European civilisation for the discovery 

 of America ; but the voyages of Columbus sink into insignificance 

 when we reflect on what had been dared and accomplished by 

 uncivilised man when he first landed on the shores of Hawaii and 

 Tahiti. 



The problem of man in the Pacific bristles with difficulties 

 differing in degree but not in kind from those relating to the flora. 

 Whenever a particular theory seems on the point of being well 

 established, some disturbing question arises, and as with the plant, 

 we are never able to push our facts quite home. Since I first 

 visited the Solomon Islands, now twenty-four years ago, the Pacific 

 islander and his flora have deeply interested me. The history of 

 man and of the plant cannot be separated in the Pacific ; and the 

 same determining principles of distribution have affected both. 



THE FOOD-PLANTS OF THE POLYNESIANS AND 

 PRE-POLYNESIANS 



One can imperfectly distinguish two sets of food-plants in this 

 region ; the first comprising such plants as Pachyrrhizus trilobus, 

 Tacca pinnatifida, Amorphophallus campanulatus, the Mountain 

 Bananas, the Wild Yams, and several others that grow wild, and, as 

 a rule, only serve as food in times of scarcity ; the second including 

 the plants that are extensively cultivated by the present islanders, 

 such as the Breadfruit, the Banana (Musa paradisiaca), the Taro 

 (Colocasia antiquorum) and the two Yams (Dioscorea alata and 

 D. sativa), &c. Those of the first set probably formed the food 

 of the earliest inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, pre-Polynesian 

 peoples that practised only a rude sort of cultivation, as with the 

 present " bush-men " of the islands of the Western Pacific. Those 



