414 A NATURALIST IN THE PACIFIC chap. 



Amongst the food-plants of this early period that are distributed 

 over the South Pacific as far east as Tahiti may be mentioned the 

 Wild Yams (D. nummularia and D. pentaphylla), the Mountain 

 Bananas, Tacca pinnatifida, Amorphophallus campanulatus, and 

 others. Of these Tacca pinnatifida and Dioscorea pentaphylla are 

 alone found in Hawaii. I will only now refer to the Mountain 

 Bananas. 



The Mountain Bananas of the tropical South Pacific, dis- 

 tinguished by their erect fruit bunches and their seeded fruits, 

 present us with one of the mysteries connected with aboriginal 

 man in this ocean. Whether in New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, 

 Rarotonga, or in Tahiti, they grow wild in the interior, and form 

 often a conspicuous feature of the vegetation in the mountains and 

 at the heads of the valleys. They are occasionally cultivated. 

 Their Fijian and Samoan names of " Soanga " and "Soa'a" 

 reproduce the names of the banana, " Saguing " and " Saing " in 

 the Tagalog language of the Philippine Islands. The Tahitian 

 appellation is "Fehi" or " Fei," and this reappears in Samoa in the 

 form of " Fa'i," the word for the common cultivated banana, Musa 

 paradisiaca. The Rarotongan name of " Uatu," as given by 

 Cheeseman, is suggestive of the Micronesian form (Ut, Uut, &c., in 

 the Carolines) of a widely spread banana word in Malaya, Melanesia, 

 and West Polynesia (Fudi, Vundi, Undi, &c., &c.). It is not 

 unlikely that all these South Pacific mountain bananas with erect 

 inflorescences and seeded fruits belong to one species, variously 

 designated by botanists as Musa fehi, M. uranoscopus, M. troglody- 

 tarum, &c., and confined to this region. Under the name of Musa 

 fehi Schumann includes the New Caledonian and Tahitian plants, 

 and he views the Samoan plant as probably identical with them. 

 This botanist, in his monograph on the Musaceae (Engler's Das 

 Pflanzenreich, 1900), establishes the home of the bananas in tropical 

 Asia, and considers that their occurrence in America before the 

 time of Columbus has not been proved. Birds have no doubt often 

 assisted in the dispersal of the wild, seeded plants ; but it is likely 

 that man is responsible for the occurrence of the mountain forms 

 in the Pacific, and probably their fruits formed when cooked one 

 of the principal articles of diet of the earliest immigrants. (There 

 evidently exists in Vanua Levu a plant very like the African Musa 

 Ensete. Its presence was only indicated by the occurrence of its 

 empty seeds in the stranded beach-drift, and reference is made to 

 it in that connection in Chapter XXIX.) 



(b) The Polynesian food-plants. — The cultivation of the yams. 



