484 FOOD PLANTS OF ANCIENT AMERICA. 



probably originated. The botanists report it as ''a common weed 

 in cultivated grounds," and we learn further that, in the absence of 

 better material, the people of Fiji use the liber for tish lines, and that 

 the plant sometimes figures in an unexplained manner in their religious 

 ceremonies, an indication of greater importance in ancient times. 



Our knowledge is far from complete regarding even the present dis- 

 tribution of the principal tropical food plants, but the need of further 

 investigation should not obscure the striking fact that several of the 

 food plants with wdiich the Spaniards l)ecame acquainted in the West 

 Indies were also staple crops on the islands and shores of the Pacific 

 and Indian Oceans, and even across tropical Africa. 



How this very ancient agricultural unity of the Tropics came about 

 may be unexplainable by history or tradition. ])ut it is scarcely more 

 m3'sterious than that so significant a fact shoukl have l)een disregarded 

 so long in studies of primitive man. Our attitude, even yet, seems to 

 be that of the mediaeval Europeans, who believed with Columbus that 

 the newly discovered "Indies" of the western Atlantic were the same 

 as those of eastern Asia. Nearly a centur}' elapsed between the dis- 

 covery of America and the realization that it was indeed a new world 

 and not merely an eastern prolongation of Asia, so that the community 

 of food plants in regions separated b}^ more than half the circumfer- 

 ence of the globe did not at first appear remarkable. Modern geogra- 

 ph}^ has proved the remoteness of the localities, but modern biology 

 gives no less definite testimony that the same plant does not originate 

 twice, and makes it plain that varieties dependent everywhere for their 

 very existence on human care must also have been distributed by human 

 agency. 



THE AGRICULTURE OF ANCIENT AMERICA. 



The most important food plants of the Poh'nesians were seven in 

 number — the taro, yam", sweet potato, sugar cane, banana. ])readfruit, 

 and cocoanut — of which six, or all except the breadfruit, existed in 

 pre-Spanish America, and of these, five, or all except the cocoanut, 

 were propagated only from cuttings. 



Except w^ith the banana, botan}^ gives us much evidence for and 

 none against the New World origin of the food plants shared by 

 ancient America with Polynesia and the tropics of the Old World, 



" Numerous species of true yams [Dioscorea) are cultivated, aucl the roots of many 

 wild species are collected for food in various parts of the Tropics. The present refer- 

 ence is to D. alata, the most widely distributed of the domesticated species and not 

 known in the wild state. 



"The Haitian name of the Dioscorea alata is axes or ajcs. It is under this denomi- 

 nation that Columbus describes the igname in the account of his first voyage; and it 

 is also that which it had in the times of Garcilasso, Acosta, and Oviedo, who have 

 very well indicated the characters by which the axes are distinguished from batates.'^ — 

 Humboldt, Kingdom of New Spain, vol. 2, p. ono. Trans, by Black, New York, 

 1811. 



