276 JOSHUA RUTLAND, ESQ., ON 
and setting of the sun, indicating the cardinal points. In a 
region thus favoured we can readily understand how 
maritime enterprise would gradually expand, and_ that 
discoveries would be made which to the rude inhabitant of 
higher latitudes were impossible. In this we have probably 
an explanation of why until the close of the fifteenth 
century the Atlantic remained a gulf across which man 
never found his way, if we except the unproductive voyages 
of the old Norsemen, though the far broader expanse 
of the Pacific had been traversed in all directions by 
peoples whose histories were even then lost in the mists of 
time. 
The preponderance of Asiatic species amongst the foreign 
cultivated plants of Polynesia and the names by which 
many of these species were known in the Eastern Pacific 
being common to the Malay Islands and Madagascar proves 
that agriculture must have entered Polynesia from the west. 
Between Polynesian agriculture of the sixteenth century and 
Malayan agriculture of the same period there was such a 
marked difference that it is impossible the former could have 
been derived from the latter. The Polynesian peoples, being 
unacquainted with the cereals, and having merely roots and 
fruit-bearing trees in cultivation, can only be assigned a 
place in the history of agriculture analogous to the place 
they hold in the history of mechanical art owing to their 
ignorance of metals. Though the system of cultivation 
practised in Polynesia was common to all semi-nomad 
agricultural races, we are not aware of any people limited to 
a similar assortment of plants. In the forest region of Africa, 
where new clearings are constantly made, various kinds of 
com are grown, and in the New World, wherever the 
inhabitants cultivated the soil before the European discovery, 
maize and beans were amongst the crops. In North America 
the cultivation of these grains appears to have preceded the 
growing of roots. Although there is not sufficient evidence 
to justify any broad conclusion, there are reasons for 
believing that the exclusive cultivation of roots was not 
always confined to Polynesia. Dampier remarked the 
preponderance of roots and fruits grown by the natives of 
the Bashee and other islands of the Eastern Malay 
Archipelago. 
In parts of Brazil where manioc starch is produced very 
little corn is used, and the Irish furnish an example of how 
largely an agricultural people can subsist on a root crop 
