258 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 



anthropologists. Thus the evidence of the existence of the banana in 

 prehistoric America is equal, if not superior, to that here presented 

 for the cocoanut. The banana and the sweet potato, both grown in 

 cultivation only from cuttings, crossed the Pacific before the advent of 

 Europeans; and this fact, not to mention here others of similar import, 

 goes far to render probable the human distribution of the cocoa palm. 

 At the same time it tends to demonstrate that the prehistoric trans- 

 Pacific communication, of which evidence is now being sought with 

 great diligence and expense in Alaska and Kamchatka, took place 

 within the Tropics. An ecological investigation of the peoples of 

 the shores and islands of the Pacific, giving special attention to the 

 species and varieties of their food plants, might be undertaken with 

 reasonable prospects of decisive results upon many questions now 

 approached onry by theory and conjecture, and upon which little light 

 can be expected from the tribes of the polar regions, who long since 

 left behind them, not onty their tropical economic plants, but all the 

 agricultural arts and habits which their remote ancestors may have 

 possessed. 



Owing to the great antiquity of the beginnings of agriculture the 

 origins of many cultivated plants are involved in obscurity. A con- 

 siderable proportion of our most important economic species are not 

 known in their wild state, presurnabty because human selection has 

 rendered their botanical relationships unrecognizable, or because the 

 original wild forms have become extinct. Even in dealing with 

 the origins of the temperate plants cultivated in the Mediterranean 

 region there are many unsolved problems, notwithstanding the great 

 amount of historical and philological testimony available, and it is thus 

 only reasonable to expect that the confusion and uncertainty will be 

 man}* times greater with the species domesticated in primitive tropical 

 societies the existence and location of which are often little more than 

 conjectural. Moreover, in the absence of formal records or historical 

 remains, the plants themselves may prove to be the best obtainable 

 clew to the locations and movements of prehistoric agricultural 

 peoples. While in such matters we ma} T not soon, if ever, attain to 

 satisfactory dehniteness and certaint} T , it is the more necessary to use 

 ever)' fact drawn from general biology or from other collateral sources 

 as a view point from which less satisfactory evidence may be inter- 

 preted. Pickering- was undoubtedly correct in believing that useful 

 plants furnish man's best record of his own primitive existence. 

 Unfortunately, that author, so zealous in collecting materials, did not 

 have at his command the botanical knowledge required for establishing 

 the identifications and origins of individual species, without which 

 fixed points of departure can not be secured and distributional studies 

 become a tano-le of drv and worthless details. 



