Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/531

Rh no cannibals, and one is safer in "dark Fijia" than in the streets of any civilized city.

An extraordinary number of the forest trees of the Fijis furnish food for man. Such are the bread-fruit, which grows to be 50 feet high, with deeply incised glossy leaves, sometimes almost two feet long. The Malay apple, or kavika (Eugenia), grows to a great height and bears a delicious fruit, which, when ripe, is white, streaked with delicate pink, and most refreshing and rose-like to the taste. The cocoanut palm clusters in dense groves along the beaches, the long leaves murmuring to the sea breeze as they wave to and fro, casting their grateful shade upon the native village. Of all trees none is more useful to tropical man than the cocoanut. In time of drought it provides a life sustaining drink, its leaves serve to thatch the sides of houses and its nuts become drinking cups, or provide oil or food; its wood serves for manifold purposes; its terminal bud is the celery of the tropical epicurean, and the sap from its flower-stalk provides an intoxicating beverage. Indeed, to do justice to its uses would lead us so far afield that we must perforce desist. Curiously, the cocoanut thrives only on the lowlands near the ocean, and flourishes best where the sea-spray settles upon its leaves, or even where its roots sink beneath the level of the salt water. Very rarely one sees a cocoanut palm growing upon the mountain side at Tahiti, up to 800 feet above the sea, but this is exceptional. Bananas and the wild plantain (Fei) grow luxuriantly in the forest, as do also oranges, lemons, limes, shaddocks, guavas, alligator pears, the papaw, mango and many other smaller shrubs and vegetables. Indeed, from remote times the natives have cultivated the soil, and their principal farinaceous food to-day consists in the yam (Dioscorea), which becomes from four to eight feet in length, and in the dalo, a caladium, which grows in swampy places. In time of harvest they often bury the breadfruit, dalo or bananas in pits lined thickly with leaves and covered with earth and with stones to foil the pigs. Treated thus, the fruit ferments and may remain for months before being cooked and eaten. Famine is indeed all but impossible in the high islands of the tropical Pacific.

In the rich soil of the broad Rewa valley sugar-cane is cultivated extensively. Cotton becomes a perennial tree in Fiji and produces an exceptionally good quality of boll. Delicious pineapples grow on the less fertile soils, and coffee thrives on the mountain slopes. Indeed, had the Fijis but a market for their produce, they would outstrip Hawaii as centers of agricultural industry.

Even in savage days the natives delighted to cultivate flowers, and the chiefs wore garlands of blossoms around their heads as do the young men and maidens of to-day. It was by means of the flowers that they