484 FOOD PLANTS OF ANCIENT AMERICA. 



probably originated. The botanists report it as " a common weed 

 in cultivated grounds," and we learn further that, in the absence of 

 better material, the people of Fiji use the fiber for fish lines, and that 

 the plant sometimes figures in an unexplained manner in their religious 

 ceremonies, an indication of greater importance in ancient times. 



Our knowledge is far from complete regarding even the present dis- 

 tribution of the principal tropical food plants, but the need of further 

 investigation should not obscure the striking fact that several of the 

 food plants with which the Spaniards became acquainted in the West 

 Indies were also staple crops on the islands and shores of the Pacific 

 and Indian Oceans, and even across tropical Africa. 



How this very ancient agricultural unity of the Tropics came about 

 may be unexplainable by history or tradition, but it is scarcely more 

 mysterious than that so significant a fact should have been disregarded 

 so long in studies of primitive man. Our attitude, even yet,, seems to 

 be that of the mediaeval Europeans, who believed with Columbus that 

 the newly discovered ' ' Indies " of the western Atlantic were the same 

 as those of eastern Asia. Nearly a century elapsed between the dis- 

 covery of America and the realization that it was indeed a new world 

 and not merely an eastern prolongation of Asia, so that the cominunity 

 of food plants in regions separated by more than half the circumfer- 

 ence of the globe did not at first appear remarkable. ^Modern geogra- 

 phy has proved the remoteness of the localities, but modern biology 

 gives no less definite testimony that the same plant does not originate 

 twice, and makes it plain that varieties dependent everyM'here for their 

 very existence on human care must also have been distributed by human 

 agency. 



THE AGEICULTUEE OF ANCIEXT AMERICA. 



The most important food plants of the Polj'nesians were seven in 

 number — the taro, yam ", sweet potato, sugar cane, banana, breadfruit, 

 and cocoanut — of which six, or all except the breadfruit, existed in 

 pre-Spanish America, and of these, five, or all except the cocoanut, 

 were propagated only from cuttings. 



Except with the banana, botany gives us much evidence for and 

 none against the New World origin of the food plants shared by 

 ancient America with Polynesia and the tropics of the Old World, 



" Numerous sin'cies nf true yams (Dioscorea) are cultivated, and the roots of many 

 wild species are collected for food in various parts of the Tropics. The present refer- 

 ence is to D. alatii, the most widely distributed of the domesticated species and not 

 kno\\n in the wild state. 



"The. Haitian name of the Dioncorea alata is (i.ic.'! or aji's. It is under this denomi- 

 niition that Columbus describes the igimtiic in the account of l"ds first voyage; and it 

 is alscj that which it had in the times of (.iarcilasso, Acosta, and Oviedo, who have 

 ^•ery well indicated the characters by which the iMes are distinguished from batatcx." — 

 Humboldt, ICingicjui of New Spain, vol. 2, p. ,355. Trans. l>v Black, New- York, 

 1811. 



