Vegetable substances used for the food of man / by Dr. Lankester. With illustrations.

  • Lankester, Edwin, 1814-1874.
Date:
[1850?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / by Dr. Lankester. With illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    culture. This circumstance occurring with regard to a substance highly nutritive, in a climate which dis poses the human frame to inaction, occasions the adoption of sago in many places as the general food of the population, to the neglect of other plants, the cultivation of which would call for some amount of exertion. The sago, or, as it is called in the Molucca ‘Islands, the libley tree, is of peculiar growth. The trunk, which is formed of the bases of the leaves, crows at first very slowly, and is covered with thorns; so soon, however, as the stem is once formed, the growth of the tree proceeds with very great rapidity, so that it speedily attains its full height of thirty feet, with a girth of five or six feet, losing in this stage its thorny accompaniments. Like the cocoa-nut tree, the sago has no distinct bark that can be peeled off, but the trunk consists of a long, hard, ligneous tube, about two inches thick, the internal area of which is filled with a kind of farinaceous pith, inter- mixed with numerous longitudinal fibres. ‘The ma- turity of the tree is known by the transpiration of a kind of whitish dust through the pores of the leaves, and when this appears the trunk is felled near to the ground. : The best account of this tree, and of the mode of preparing its pith for use as human food, is to be seen in Forrest’s account of the Molucca Islands: it 3s to the following effect. “ The tree being felled, is cut into lengths of five or six feet. A part of the hard wood is then sliced off, and the workman, coming to the pith, cuts across the longitudinal fibres and the pith together, leaving apart at each end uncut, so that when it is exca- vated, there remains a trough, into which the pulp is again put, mixed with water, and beaten with a piece of wood. Then the fibres, separated from the pulp,