FOOD PLANTS OP ANCIENT AMERICA. 497 



Botanical evidence makes it plain that most of the plants shared by 

 the people of the two continents originated in America, like numer- 

 ous other cultivated species which remained limited to this continent. 

 The primitive culture peoples of the tropical regions of ancient America 

 were accustomed to the cooking, grinding, and storing of vegetable 

 food, and were thus prepared to appreciate and utilize the cereals by 

 agricultural experience lacking among the fruit-eating aborigines of 

 the Old World, where there seems to have been no tendency toward a 

 spontaneous development of agriculture. Civilizations have nowhere 

 developed without the assistance of the farinaceous root crops and 

 cereals, the use and cultivation of which are habits acquired by primi- 

 tive man in America and carried in remote times westward across the 

 Pacific, together with the social organization and constructive arts 

 which appear only in settled communities supported by the tillage of 

 the soil. 



