CHAPTER XXVIII 



THE POLYNESIAN AND HIS PLANTS 



Identity of the problems presented by the indigenous plants and the peoples 

 of the Pacific islands. — The food-plants of the Polynesians and the pre- 

 Polynesians. — Their weeds. — The aboriginal weeds. — The white man's 

 weeds. — Weeds follow the cultivator but are distributed by birds. — The 

 general dispersion of weeds antedates the appearance of the Polynesian in 

 the Pacific. — Weeds of little value to the ethnologist. — Aleurites moluccana. 

 — Inocarpus edulis, Gyrocarpus Jacquini, Serianthes myriadenia, Leucaena 

 Forsteri, Mussaenda frondosa, Luffa insularum. — Summary. 



Man and the Seed 



Man in his distribution in the islands of the Pacific reproduces in a 

 minor degree nearly all the difficulties presented there by plants, 

 birds, and other forms of animal life. Like the plant he entered 

 the ocean from the west ; and as with the plants, so with the 

 aborigines, there was an era of general dispersion over this ocean, 

 followed by an age in which Polynesian man, ceasing to migrate, 

 tended to settle down in the several groups, there undergoing 

 differentiation in various respects, as in physical characters, in 

 language, and in manners. Just as we can now recognise the type 

 of a plant, of a bird, or of an insect, that belongs to a particular 

 group of islands, so we can distinguish between the Hawaiian, the 

 Tahitian, and the Maori, whether in physical characters, in his 

 speech, or in his customs. Fiji possesses in the Papuan element of 

 its Melanesian population the earliest type of man in the Pacific, 

 just as it also possesses in the Coniferae the most ancient types of 

 trees in this region. Divesting his mind of all previous conceptions, 

 the ethnologist, as I have remarked in my discussion of the 

 distribution of Freycinetia in Chapter XXV, might profitably study 

 de novo the dispersion of man in the Pacific from the standpoint 

 of plant- dispersal. 



