750 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIII. No. 593. 



fertilized. Northward from that locality to 

 its most northerly one, a distance of fifty 

 miles, the papaw plants seldom flowered, and 

 if one occasionally bore flowers, the ovaries 

 never matured. 



Here, then, is the case of a plant losing its 

 power of reproduction from some natural 

 cause, but still growing thriftily at short in- 

 tervals along a stretch of more than fifty miles 

 beyond its fruiting limit. It is not necessary 

 to my present purpose to inquire into that 

 cause, but the unfruitfulness of the plant was 

 no doubt due to the failure of one or more of 

 the various devices which nature provides for 

 the pollination of flowers; and that condition, 

 as well as the diminishing stature of the plant 

 toward the north, was perhaps correlated with 

 climatic change. This case of the papaw, 

 however, is so unusual that one naturally 

 wonders how that northern portion of its geo- 

 graphical dispersion could have been accom- 

 plished without the aid of the function of re- 

 production at every stage of its progress. It 

 is necessary to assume that every one of those 

 unfruitful papaw plants within the range men- 

 tioned originated from seed which was brought 

 from a southward locality by some biological, 

 and not a physical, agency. That is, the 

 transportation could not have been effected by 

 either air or water currents because the large, 

 oblong, flattened seeds of the papaw are too 

 heavy to be borne by the wind, and all the 

 fluviatile currents of that region are in an 

 opposite direction. It is quite improbable 

 that the seeds were transported by either birds 

 or quadrupedal animals, because, while the 

 ripe fruit-pulp would be greedily eaten by 

 some of them, the seeds are evidently unsuited 

 for the food of any; and because no frugivor- 

 ous birds or other animals of that region have 

 the migratory and garnering habits which 

 such a suggestion requires. Moreover, the 

 papaw ripens its fruit when southward, and 

 not northward, bird-migration is impending. 

 It, therefore, seems necessary to assume that 

 the transportation of the seeds was effected 

 by human agency; and because one fails to 

 see how their germination and growth in 

 those northern localities could have been ad- 



vantageous to any human interests it further 

 seems necessary to assume that their dis- 

 tribution was incidentally, but not intention- 

 ally, connected with the nomadic habits of 

 the Indians. This suggestion is not wholly 

 satisfactory when one considers only the or- 

 dinary conditions of Indian life, because the 

 fresh, ripe fruit was never too abundant in 

 any part of that region for immediate use, it 

 is not suitable for preservation in camp, and 

 the seeds have no obvious value. I, however, 

 casually discovered what seems to be a suffi- 

 cient explanation of the manner of transporta- 

 tion of those seeds and of the circumstances 

 of their germination beyond the geographical 

 limits of the natural fruiting of the species. 

 The Sac and Fox Indians were originally 

 in possession of both banks of the Mississippi 

 River from the confluence of the Missouri 

 River to above that of Iowa River. This 

 region includes the continuous range of the 

 papaw from where it reaches full fruitage to 

 the northernmost limit of its merely vege- 

 tative growth which already has been men- 

 tioned. Those Indians were in the habit of 

 ranging all that portion of the great river in 

 their canoes and of camping upon its banks. 

 Upon one of my excursions I came upon one 

 of their river-bank camps, when the men were 

 away fishing or hunting and a small group of 

 women were sitting in a circle on the ground 

 playing a game which consisted of tossing a 

 small number of papaw seeds in a basin. The 

 hard, smooth seeds each bore a distinguishing 

 artificial mark, upon one side only, the differ- 

 ence in the form of the marks as they ap- 

 peared after each throw, evidently indicating 

 differences of value in counting the game. 

 As I and my companion stopped to watch the 

 game I said to him ' those are papaw seeds.' 

 One of the women looked up with a smile — 

 she was pei'haps a winner in the game — and 

 said, ' yes, papaw,' and pointed to a quantity 

 of the seeds that lay on a garment near her, 

 evidently their stock for future games. With- 

 out doubt that game had been practised by the 

 Sac and Fox Indians for centuries, and it is 

 easy to understand how they could have pro- 

 cured the seeds by their southern journeys. 



