NEW HORTICULTURAL CROPS FOR FOOD SUPPLY 57 



of Physalis, or ground cherries, native to North America, several 

 of which are promising vegetables and have been more or less used 

 by pioneers. Solanum nigrum, the nightshade, a cosmopolite 

 of America and Europe, recently much advertised under several 

 misleading names, and its congener, Solanum triflonim, both really 

 wild tomatoes, are worthy of cultivation and in fact are readily 

 ;ydelding to improvement. Amarantkus retroflexus, one of the 

 common pigweeds of gardens, according to Watson, is cultivated 

 for its seeds by the Arizona Indians. In China and Japan the 

 corms or tubers of a species of Sagittaria are commonly sold for 

 food. There are several American species, one of which at least 

 was used wherever found by the Indians, and under the name 

 arrowhead, swan potato and swamp potato has given welcome 

 sustenance to pioneers. Our native lotus, a species of Nehimbo, 

 was much prized by the aborigines, seeds, roots and stalks being 

 eaten. Sagittaria and Nelumho furnish starting points for valuable 

 food plants for countless numbers of acres of water-covered marshes 

 when the need to utilize these now waste places becomes pressing. 



The temptation is strong to continue this discussion of the 

 domestication of native plants, but time demands that I pass to a 

 consideration of the second potential of an increased diet, that of 

 better distribution of the world's food-producing plants. 



Beginning with the discovery of the New World, botanical and 

 agricultural explorations have been carried on with zeal, and food 

 plants have been interchanged freely between newly discovered 

 lands and older civilizations. Yet in these centuries the food-plant 

 floras of races have been changed but little. Quite too often a crop 

 is found to be the monopoly of a race or nation irrespective of soil 

 and climate, factors which ought to import a cultivated flora. It 

 would seem that agriculturists would quickly adopt food plants 

 grown elsewhere of which the advantage is evident, and be thereby 

 diverted from the cultivation of poorer crops in their own country. 

 Yet the introduction of foreign plants is usually arrested, if not 

 actually opposed by the timidity of agriculture, and it has been 

 most difficult to introduce new crops into old regions. This con- 

 servation on the part of those who grow the food plants of the coun- 

 try is due to a universal dislike in the animal kingdom, most 

 strongly developed in the human family, to eating unfamiliar foods. 



