346 THE UNIVERSE. 



We are astonished when sailors tell us that the islanders 

 of Otaheite actually prepare bread by simply placing upon 

 a gridiron slices of a large fruit which grows in their island, 

 and that these, when they are taken from the gridiron, have 

 precisely the taste of the bread made by our bakers. This 

 is easily explained. The fruit of the bread-fruit tree, for 

 it is so called, which reaches an enormous size, generally 

 weighing more than two pounds, and sometimes four or 

 five, is crammed with fecula, and owing to this only re- 

 quires to be sliced and exposed to heat in order to be trans- 

 formed into genuine warm bread. 



Strabo relates that when the army of Alexander was 

 traversing Gedrosia, the men, being utterly without food, 

 supported themselves for some time on the pith of a certain 

 species of palm. The same thing happened, according to 

 the account given by Xenophon, during the famous retreat 

 of the ten thousand Greeks. All this is also naturally ex- 

 plained by the abundance of alimentary fecula contained in 

 the trunks of certain palms. A similar fact is now repeated 

 every day of our lives. Every one knows that the sago, so 

 frequently used at our tables, is obtained from the central 

 and medullary part of the stem of the sago-palm, which 

 originally belongs to India. 



