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.

In Polynesia the evidence thus offered by cultivated plants points to
the spread of Asiatic culture eastward across the Pacific, while the
peculiarities of the cultivated plants of America point to its isolation
from all the rest of the world; an isolation which is further
established by a radical dissimilarity of all American languages from
Old World linguistic stocks. In no language of the New World, for
example, is there a vestige of Hebrew, which would support the cherished
theory of the migration to this continent of the lost tribes of Israel;
nor is there a suggestion of any linguistic element to indicate
connection with the Chinese, nor any relationship between the builders
of the American pyramids and those of Egypt.

There are