ich has been compared to that of boiled potatoes and sweet milk. Of
this fruit A.R. Wallace, in his _Malay Archipelago_, says: "With meat
and gravy it is a vegetable superior to anything I know either in
temperate or tropical countries. With sugar, milk, butter or treacle it
is a delicious pudding, having a very slight and delicate but
characteristic flavour, which, like that of good bread and potatoes, one
never gets tired of." In the Pacific Islands the fruit is preserved for
use by storing in pits, where the fruits ferment and resolve themselves
into a mass similar in consistency to new cheese, in which state they
emit an offensive odour; but after baking under hot stones they yield a
pleasant and nutritious food. Another and more common method of
preserving the fruit for use consists in cutting it into thin slices,
which are dried in the sun. From such dried slices a flour is prepared
which is useful for the preparation of puddings, bread and biscuits, or
the slices are baked and eaten without grinding. The tree yields other
products of economic value, such as native cloth from the fibrous inner
bark of young trees; the wood is used for canoes and articles of
furniture; and a kind of glue and caulking material are obtained from
the viscid milky juice which exudes from incisions made in the stem.

[Illustration: _Artocarpus incisa_, the Bread-fruit tree.

Fig. 1. Branch reduced about a 6th natural size, with cuneate-ovate
pinnatifid leaves, male flowers in a club-shaped deciduous catkin,
and female flowers in rounded clusters.
Fig. 2. Transverse section of the male spike with numerous flowers.
Fig. 3. Male flowers.
Fig. 4. Single male flower separated, with a perianth in 2 segments
and a single stamen.
Fig. 5. Female flowers.
Fig. 6. Single female flower separated, with ovary, style and bifid
stigma.
Fig. 7. Ovary.
Fig. 8. Ovary laid open to show the ovule.
Fig. 9. A variety of the ovary with 2 loculaments.
Fig. 10. Transverse section of a bilocular ovary.]

The bread-fruit is found throughout the tropical regions of both
hemispheres, and its first introduction into the West Indies is
connected with the famous mutiny of the "Bounty," and the remarkable
history of a small company of the mutineers at Pitcairn Island.
Attention was directed to the fruit in 1688 by Captain Dampier, and
later by Captain Cook, who recommended its transplantation to the West
Indian colonies. In 1787