DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE. 189 



Artocarpus communis. BREADFRUIT. PLATES vn, xxvn, xxxvi. 



Family Moraceae. 

 LOCAL NAMES. Seed lass variety: Lemae, Lemai, Lemay, Rima (Guam); Rima, 



Colo, Kolo (Philippines); 'Ulu (Samoa, Hawaii); Uto (Fiji). Arbol del pan 



(Spanish). Seeded variety: Dugdug, Dogdog (Guam); Breadnut (Burma); 



Tipolo, Antipolo (Philippines); 'Ulu-ma'a (Samoa); Uto-sore (Fiji); Bulia 



(Solomon Islands). 



A handsome tree, with viscid, milky juice, broad-lobed or digitate leaves, and 

 gently curving limbs, bearing the celebrated breadfruit. This fruit is oval or spheroid 

 in shape, about the size of a child's head or of a melon. It is formed by the female 

 flowers, which are very numerous, and are grouped in a prickly head upon a spongy 

 receptacle. In the fertile typical form the fruit is covered with short hard projec- 

 tions, but in the cultivated breadfruit, which is seedless, it is much smoother and 

 reticulated. The male flowers grow in dense, yellow, club-shaped catkins. The 

 leaves are very large, leathery, ovate, wedge-shaped and entire at the base, the upper 

 part 3 to 9-lobed or pinnatifid, dark green and glossy, and paler beneath. The fruit 

 is at first green, becoming brownish when imperfectly ripe and yellow when fully 

 so. It contains a somewhat fibrous pulp, pure white at first, but becoming yellow at 

 maturity. It is attached to the small branches of the tree by a short, thick stalk, 

 and hangs either singly or in clusters of two or three together. 



It is eaten before it becomes ripe, while the pulp is still white and mealy, of a 

 consistency intermediate between new bread and sweet potatoes. In Guam it was 

 formerly cooked after the manner of most Pacific island aborigines, by means of 

 heated stones in a hole in the earth, layers of the stones, breadfruit, and green leaves 

 alternating. It is still sometimes cooked in this way on ranches; but the usual way 

 of cooking it is to boil it or to bake it in ovens; or it is cut in slices and fried like 

 potatoes. The last method is the one usually preferred by foreigners. The fruit 

 baked or boiled is rather tasteless by itself, but with salt and butter or with gravy it 

 is a palatable as well as a nutritious article of diet. Ovens w T ere introduced into 

 Guam by the Mexican soldiers who were brought by the Spaniards to assist in the 

 " reduction " of the natives. They are of masonry and of the typical dome shape of 

 the ovens so common in Mexico. A kind of biscuit is made by slicing the fruit 

 into moderately thin sections after having cooked it, and drying the slices either in 

 the sun or in ovens. Thus prepared it will last from one breadfruit season to another. 

 The dried slices may be eaten either as they are or toasted, or ground up and cooked 

 in various ways. The Caroline Islanders, a colony of whom lived until recently on 

 the island of Guam, follow a custom widely spread in the Pacific of preserving bread- 

 fruit in pits, where it ferments and is converted into a mass resembling new cheese, 

 in which state it gives forth a very disagreeable odor. The fermented paste is made 

 into cakes and baked, and is then palatable and nutritious. This method of pre- 

 serving breadfruit is also followed by the Samoans, who call the cakes "masi," a 

 name now applied by them to ship biscuit and crackers. In Rarotonga the fer- 

 mented paste is called " mai." 



The tree yields other products of economic value, such as native cloth or tapa, from 

 the fibrous inner bark of young trees and branches, and a kind of glue and calking 

 material obtained from the viscid milky juice, which exudes copiously from incisions 

 made in the stem. Bark cloth is no longer made in Guam. It is recorded that dur- 

 ing an interval of eleven years, when no ship visited the island and there was a 

 scarcity of woven fabrics, a number of women made petticoats from the breadfruit 

 bark. In Pigafetta's account of the discovery of the group by Magellan he says: 

 " The women also go naked, except that they cover their nature with a thin bark, 

 pliable like paper, which grows between the tree and the bark of the palm." Now 

 the paper mulberry (Papi/rius papyriferux) , the most common tapa-cloth plant of 

 the Pacific islands, does not grow in Guam. There is no palm to w r hich Pigafetta's 

 description could apply, and it is quite probable that the "thin bark, pliable like 



