FOOD PLANTS OF ANCIENT AMERICA. 489 



stances which retain or absorb moisture, the starch of the taro, cassava, 

 arrowroot, canna, and other root crops can be quickly and thoroughly 

 dried, and will then keep indefinitely. In the absence of cereals this 

 simple expedient might well be deemed an epoch-making discovery, 

 since it rendered possible the accumulation of a permanent, readily 

 transportable, food supply, and thus protected man from the vicissitudes 

 of the season and the chase. That the resulting economic difference 

 appeared striking to the hunting tribes of Guiana is apparent in the 

 name they gave to their agricultural neighbors, whom they called 

 "Arawacks" or "eaters of meal." 



Cassava in the raw state carries a deadly charge of prussic acid and 

 begins to decay in a few hours after being taken from'the ground, but 

 properly prepared it furnishes the starch which keeps best, and which 

 in the form of tapioca our civilization is tardily learning to appre- 

 ciate as a wholesome delicacy. In spite of its unpromising qualities 

 when raw, cassava seems to have been the first and only root crop 

 used by many South American tribes who plant nothing else except 

 the so-called peach palm {Guilielma), a species which gives suggestive 

 evidence of a cultivation much older than that of the date palm, since 

 it is generally seedless, and is not known in the wild state. The 

 farinaceous fruits are made into meal and baked into cakes in the same 

 manner as the cassava, to which recourse is necessary during the 

 months in which the single harvest of palm fruits is exhausted. '^' 



Cassava is, indeed, so distinctively the best, as well as the most 

 generously and continuously productive, of the tropical root crops, that 

 it could hardly have been known in the regions in which the others 

 were domesticated. Ever since the Spanish conquest put an end to 

 the isolation of the native peoples of tropical America the use of 

 cassava has been slowly extending at the expense of similar crops; it 

 has also found a footing in the Malay region and other parts of the 

 East. 



THE DOMESTICATION OF THE BANANA. 



In further support of the suggestion that the ^ use of the starch- 

 producing root crops is a distinctively American development of primi- 

 tive agriculture is the fact that the tropics of the Old World contributed 

 no important cultivated plant of this class, and none which give evi- 

 dence of long domestication. On the other hand, such regions as 

 Madagascar and East Africa, where Polynesians are now supposed by 

 ethnologists to have settled in " remote prehistoric times," continued 



o Some of these tribes are extremely primitive and, in the absence of all domestic 

 implements, grate their cassava on the exposed spiny roots of another native palm 

 {Iriariea exorhiza). Some Indian tribes of Guiana are similarly dependent upon still 

 a third palm (Mauriiia), from the pith of which they secure starch in a manner 

 strongly suggestive of that used with the sago palm of the Malay region. 



