Dr. W. E. Safford, Botanist, Bureau of Plant Industry, then spoke on the Use of Nuts by the Aboriginal Americans.
DR. SAFFORD: My interest in nuts has been confined almost entirely to those of American origin. For a good many years, I have been studying the plants, and plant products, utilized for food, and for other purposes, by the aboriginal Americans, before the arrival in this hemisphere of Columbus and his companions.
In this connection, there is a striking contrast between the American Indians and the primitive Polynesians. The chief economic plants encountered by early explorers on the islands of the Pacific Ocean were identical with well known Asiatic species. Coconuts, breadfruit, taro, sugar cane, yams and bananas, the most important food staples of the Polynesians, had been known to the Old World for centuries before the Pacific Islands were visited by Europeans; the shrub, from the bark of which the Polynesians made their tapa cloth, was identical with the paper mulberry of China and Japan; and the principal screwpine, or Pandanus, from which the Polynesians made their mats, was a well-known species of southern Asia. A number of these plants had even carried their Asiatic names with them to Polynesia. The Polynesian language itself, with its varied dialects, spoken in Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand, Easter Island and on other island groups, can be traced without difficulty to the Malay Archipelago, the cradle of the Polynesian race.
In America, on the other hand, every cultivated plant encountered by Columbus and his companions was new. Not a single Old World food crop had found its way to our hemisphere before the Discovery; not a grain of wheat, rye, oats, or barley; no peas, cabbage, beets, turnips, watermelon, musk-melon, egg-plant, or other Old World vegetable; no apple, quince, pear, peach, plum, orange, lemon, mango, or other Old World fruit, had reached America. Even the cotton which was encountered in the West Indies by Columbus the very morning after the Discovery, proved to be a distinct species and could not be made to hybridize with Old World cottons. Conversely, no American cultivated plants; no maize, no beans, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes; no cacao (from which chocolate is made); no pine-apples, avocadoes, custard apples nor guavas; no Brazil nuts, pecans, or hickory nuts; nor any other American food staple had found their way to the Old World; even the beeches, chestnuts, oaks, and maples were distinct; and the same is true of the New World ground nuts and the grapes, which were the parent species of our delicious American varieties. Quite unlike anything in the Old World were such cultivated plants as the Cactaceae, the capsicum peppers, and the manioc from which cassava is made.