Chapter II: ), they might be distributed by birds. Dr. Reinecke describes

another inland species from Samoa, T. samoensis. The beach plant, T. pinnatifida, grows so typically (sometimes side by side with T. maculata) in the inland plains of Fiji that one would not be justified, apart from questions of affinity, in regarding it as the parent form of inland species in the Pacific islands.

For food and other purposes Tacca pinnatifida is or was much valued by the Pacific islanders, and it grows so abundantly that cultivation is rarely practised. That the Polynesians have aided the currents in the distribution of the plant there can be no doubt, and this is particularly indicated by its occurrence in Hawaii. The genus contains ten or a dozen species, of which at least three are peculiar to America; but T. pinnatifida, the characteristic shore-plant of the Old World, and according to Schimper the only one that can be so designated, is not found in America, where, as far as I can gather, there is no widely-spread beach species dispersed by the currents from which the peculiar species could have been derived. In the case of the Pacific species, however, it should be noted that I am not endeavouring to prove the improbability of the inland species having been derived from the coast species in other regions, as in Australia, but that my point is to show there is no reason to suppose that this has taken place in the Pacific. There is no difficulty in attributing the dispersal of inland species to birds; and we are therefore not called on to connect them with the beach plants.