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.
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 many distinct groups of American languages. Very often the language of a tribe is quite unlike that of its nearest neighbors; while at the same time it may resemble the languages of tribes quite remote. This fact indicates former segregation of the various groups speaking the unlike languages and a common ancestry or close association of the tribes speaking the allied dialects. As examples, I might mention the Quichua Indians of Peru, whose language is very unlike the languages spoken by the Arawak and Carib Indians to their northward and, at the same time, quite distinct from the languages of their Brazilian neighbors to the eastward. The Aztecs of Mexico spoke a language differing radically in structure as well as in vocabulary from the Maya language of their Yucatan neighbors; yet there is unquestionably a relationship between the Aztecs and a number of very distant tribes, shown by resemblances of their languages, as in the case of the Shoshone Indians of the northern United States and the Nuhuatl tribes of Salvador and Costa Rica. In the same way, the Algonquian dialects, which differ greatly from those of the Iroquoian, show a close relationship between very widely scattered tribes in North America, from North Carolina to Quebec. Such resemblances and radical differences point to a very remote and long-continued segregation which permitted the independent formation of distinct linguistic stocks; while the antiquity of man in America, both north and south of the equator, is further attested by the development of such a cultivated and highly specialized food staple as maize, whose ancestral prototype we have sought in vain. Its endless varieties, fitted for widely diverse conditions of soil and climate, also point to a long period of cultivation in dissimilar culture-areas, which enabled them to adapt themselves to conditions very different from those of the original stock from which they sprang.
All this evidence points to the peopling of this continent at a very remote time, perhaps as far back as the close of the Glacial Epoch; and it also indicates that the early progenitors of our Indian tribes had left their original homes in the Old World before any of the linguistic Old-World stocks had taken shape; before Sanscrit was Sanscrit; before the languages of China or any other Asiatic people had become established; and just as in this hemisphere the natives developed their own languages from the most primitive elements of speech, so most certainly did they develop their agriculture from the wild plants of the fields, the swamps, the hillsides, and the forests. In both respects, as I have already pointed out, they differed from the Polynesians who brought with them to their island homes not only their language but their agriculture, from the cradle of their race in the Malay Archipelago; cuttings of seedless breadfruit and of sugarcane, fleshy roots of taro and yams; even trees, like the Indian almond and the candlenut.
Here I would like to point out to the members of the Nut Growers' Association the chief difference between nuts and other food staples. Nearly all of our cultivated vegetables, including maize, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squashes and pumpkins, are annuals, sensitive to frost, which must be raised from seed each year, and which differ so greatly from the primitive plants from which they came that their ancestral forms cannot be definitely determined. Most of these vegetables are in all probability of hybrid origin, the result of cross pollination and selection. In the case of our native nuts the conditions are quite different. We know the original ancestor of the pecan, our hickories and our walnuts. The fine varieties now cultivated are not hybrids but have been selected from wild trees. In connection with nuts I would also point out that in all probability they were the most important food-staple of primitive man, as well as of his simian ancestors. It required no great intelligence to gather them or to store them after the fashion followed by squirrels. Intelligence, however, is required to plant nuts and to transplant nut trees. Still greater intelligence is involved in the process of preparing certain nuts for food. A delicious creamy emulsion, for instance, was prepared by the Virginian Indians from hickory nuts. Cracking them and removing the kernels was too long and tedious an operation; so they developed a method of gathering them in quantities and crushing them in a hollowed log, together with water, pounding them to a paste and then straining out the fragments of shells through a basket sieve. The milky fluid which was thus formed was allowed to stand until the thick creamy substance separated from the water. The water was then poured off, and the delicious cream which remained was used as a component of various dishes. This substance was called by the Virginian Algonkian Indians "Pawcohiccora," a word which has been abbreviated and modified to "Hickory," the name by which we now designate not only the nuts, but the tree and its wood.
It is interesting to note that a similar creamy or butter-like substance was derived by a similar process from various palm nuts in Central and South America. Cieza de Leon describes such a process in his Chronicle of Peru, in connection with a nut which was described as Cocos butyraceæ, but which was not a true Cocos, or coconut. Long before the discovery of America, a somewhat similar process was used in the Nicobar Islands for extracting a creamy substance from the grated kernel of the true coconut, Cocos nucifera, which in early times was called Nux indica. This process is still followed throughout Polynesia. Some of the most savory dishes of the Samoans and the natives of Guam are enriched and flavored with this coconut cream, which is a substance quite distinct from the water, or so-called milk, contained in the hollow kernel of the nut, which is so commonly used for drinking.
Coming back to America, I would call attention to the value of some of our native pine nuts and acorns as food staples. Certain Indian tribes of the Southwest live upon pine nuts at certain seasons when they are ripe. Dr. C. Hart Merriam has told of the utilization of acorns by various tribes of Indians in a beautifully illustrated article published in the National Geographic Magazine, 1918, entitled "The Acorn, a Possibly Neglected Source of Food." "To the native Indians of California," he says, "the acorn is, and always has been, the staff of life, furnishing the material for their daily mush and bread." He describes the process of gathering and storing them, shelling, drying, grinding the kernels, leaching out the bitter tannic acid, and preparing the acorn meal in various ways for food. In eastern North America, several species of acorns were somewhat similarly used, including those of the live oaks of our southern states. The Spaniards of Florida sometimes toasted them and used them as a substitute for chocolate or coffee. Chinkapins were used for food by the earliest English colonists. They are mentioned by Herriot, the historian of Sir Walter Raleigh's colony at Roanoke. In addition to these, the early colonists learned to eat the so-called "water-chinkapins", which are fruits of the beautiful golden-flowered American lotus, Nelumbo lutea, a plant closely allied to the sacred lotus of India, China and Japan, whose nuts are even now used as a food staple. The split kernels of the latter may be bought in the Chinese shops on Pennsylvania Avenue in this city. The rootstocks of both the American and the Oriental lotus are also used for food. They resemble bananas joined together end to end, with several hollow longitudinal tubes running through them.
Before I close, I should like to call attention to a plant, endemic in eastern North America, whose tubers were called "ground-nuts," or "Indian potatoes" by the early colonists. The latter name caused the plant to be mistaken by certain early writers for the white potato, which was unknown in North America in early colonial days, but which was confused with the ground nut on account of the resemblance of the descriptions of the two plants. The white potato, Solanum tuberosum, was discovered in the Andes of South America by Cieza de Leon; it was quite unknown in North America or in the West Indies in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, both of whom have erroneously been given the credit of introducing the potato into England. The "potato" which they observed in the West Indies was not Solanum tuberosum, which we now call the "white potato" or "Irish potato," but a very distinct plant, Ipomoea batatas, which we now call the "sweet potato," but which in early days was known as the batata or potato. The error which has become widely spread, can be traced to John Gerarde, the first author to publish an illustration of Solanum tuberosum. In his celebrated Herball he declares that the potatoes figured by him were grown in his garden from tubers which came from "Virginia, or Norembega." It is quite certain that this statement was untrue, and that, as certain English writers have already suggested, Gerard "wished to mystify his readers." Whatever may have been his motive, the error became widely spread. Even Thomas Jefferson was led to believe that Solanum tuberosum was encountered in Virginia by the early colonists, and Schoolcraft declared that its tubers were gathered wild in the woods like other wild roots. The Indian potato of the early colonists is still abundant in "moist and marish grounds," as described by Herriot. It is a tuber-bearing plant of the bean family, and is known botanically as Glycine apios.