FOOD PLANTS OF ANCIENT AMEBICA. 485 



though few of them are known under conditions which warrant a 

 belief that they now exist anywhere in a truly wild state. The partial 

 or complete seedlessness attained by several of the important species 

 also indicates dependence upon human assistance in propagation for a 

 very long period of time, and precludes all rational doubt that their 

 wide dissemination was accomplished through the direct agency of 

 primitive man. 



Ethnologists will not deny that in the Old World this distribution 

 was the work of the remote ancestors of the Polynesians, traces of 

 whose presence have been found distributed over the area included 

 between Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, Formosa, Malaya, 

 Madagascar, and even across the African continent." We have not 

 been provided, however, with any explanation of the existence of 

 these food plants in America, for ethnologists do not admit that the 

 eastward migrations of the Polynesians reached this continent, but hold 

 that the tribes, languages, customs, and arts of the American Indians 

 are of truly indigenous development, not imported from Asia or else- 

 where, as so frequently and variously conjectured. 



"I maintain, therefore, in conclusion, that up to the present time 

 there has not been shown a single dialect, not an art nor an institution, 

 not a myth or religous rite, not a domesticated plant or animal, not a 

 tool, weapon, game, or symbol, in use in America at the time of the 

 discovery, which had previously been imported from Asia or from any 

 continent of the Old World."* 



If this conclusion be adopted it is obvious that the food plants com- 

 mon to the two hemispheres must have been derived from America. 

 This alternative seems not to have been canvassed with the standpoint 

 and methods of modern ethnology, but it is safe to say that in Asia no- 



"Frobenius, Zeitsch. der Gesellsch. fiir Erdkunde zu Berlin, Bd. 33, 1898. Eeport 

 of the Smithsonian Institution for 1898, i>p. 637-650. 



^Brinton, D. G., in Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, p. 

 151, Chicago, 1894. The same argument has been stated somewhat less radically by 

 Payne, but with no more adequate appreciation of the significance of the facts of 

 tropical agriculture: 



"If advancement was at some remote time imported from the Old World into the 

 New, how happens it that at the discovery all the domesticated animals and nearly 

 all the cultivated -food plants of the Old World were either wanting or existed only 

 in a wild state in the New World? * * * Pulse [the bean] was the only culti- 

 vated plant common to America and the Old World. * * * Civilized immigrants 

 from Asia would naturally strike the New World in British Columbia or Oregon; 

 and the doctrine of imported advancement finds its most decisive refutation in the 

 fact that from the most remote until recent times agriculture was here absolutely 

 unknown." Payne, Hist, of the New World called America, Vol. II, p. 340-347. 



It is ■ possible that there were no Old World cultivated plants in America except 

 the banana, which evidently arrived late. That Asiatic agriculture was not intro- 

 duced into America is, however, far from proving that American agriculture was not 

 introduced into Asia. 



