60 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



Let US turn to a few examples of promising vegetable and farm 

 crops of foreign countries not yet cultivated in the United States. 

 Only those which give most emphasis to the present paper can be 

 mentioned. 



All know that rice furnishes the chief food of China, but few are 

 aware that sorghum is as important a crop in Asia as rice and that 

 it is the chief food of a large part of x-Vfrica. In China not only 

 are the stalks of sorghum used, but bread is made from the seeds. 

 In parts of India, sorghum is the staff of life. The Zulu Kaffirs 

 live on the stalks, which are chewed and sucked, and Livingstone 

 says, "the people grow fat thereon." The several species of yams 

 constitute one of the cheapest and most widely distributed food 

 plants in the world, yet the yam is little grown in America. Several 

 genera of Aroideae, as Caladium, Alocasia, Colocasia, and Arum, 

 each with innumerable varieties, furnish taro, arrowroot, ape and 

 other more or less familiar food to the South Sea islanders. In a 

 bulletin from the L^nited States Department of Agriculture, under 

 the title, "Promising Root Crops for the South," these Aroids, 

 called under their native names of yautias, taros, and dasheens 

 are recommended as most valuable wet-land root crops for the 

 South Atlantic and Gulf States. Of the place of the cocoanut in 

 the world's economy I need not speak. Varieties of Maranta 

 were grown in Mississippi and Georgia in 1849, but disappeared. 

 From one of the several species of this genus comes the arrowroot 

 of commerce. Arrowroot is a favorite food of the Fijis and 

 their neighbors^ as well as of the inhabitants of Cape Colony, Natal, 

 and Queensland. May not arrowroot some time be produced 

 profitably in America? The banana has been on our tables less 

 than a generation, yet it is now one of the commonest foods. 

 There are several species and many varieties yet to be introduced 

 into the tropics of America. The leaves and buds of several agaves 

 furnish an abundant and a very palatable food to our southern 

 neighbors. From plants of the large genus Manihot of equatorial 

 regions, tapioca is made under conditions which could be greatly 

 improved. As cassava, one of these manihots is already important 

 in the United States and may some time compete with corn and 

 wheat in the food supply of the country. 



To quench the thirst of the teeming millions in time to come 



