BREADFRUIT TREE, Artocarpus incise. A tree of the order .11oracew, a native of the islands of the Pacific Ocean and of the Indian Archipel ago. It is one of the most important natural products of these regions. its fruit supplying food, and its inner bark a material for making clothing, while its timber and its milky juice are also employed for economic purposes. The breadfruit tree is a rather slender tree, 40 to 50 feet high, often rising almost half its height without a branch. It has large pinnatifid leaves, frequently 12 to 18 inches long. dark green, and glossy. The fruit is generally oval, or nearly spherical, and about the size of a child's head. It is a sorosis, a compound or aggregate fruit formed from numerous flowers on a common axis, and is covered with a roughish rind, which is marked with small square or lozenge-shaped having each a small elevation in the cen tre: it is at first green: when imperfectly ripened, brown, and when fully ripe assumes a rich yellow hue, It is attached to the small branches of the tree by a short thick stalk, and hangs either singly or in clusters of two or three together. It contains a somewhat fibrous pulp, which, when ripe, becomes juicy and yellow, but has then a rotten taste. At an earlier stage, when the fruit is gathered for use, the pulp is white and mealy, and of a consistence resembling that of new bread. In a still less mature state, the fruit contains a viscous white milk. The common practice in the South Sea Islands is to cut each fruit into three or four pieces, and take out the core; then to place heated stones in the bottom of a hole dug in the earth, cover them with green leaves, and upon this to place a layer of the fruit, then stones, leaves, and fruit alternately, till the hole is nearly filled, when leaves and earth to the depth of several inches are spread over all. In rather more than half an hour, the bread fruit is ready; "the outsides are, in general. nicely browned, and the inner part presents a white or yellowish cellular pulpy substance, in appearance slightly resembling the crumb of a wheaten loaf." It has little taste. but is fre
quently sweetish, and more resembles the plan tain than bread made of wheat flour. it is slightly astringent. and highly nutritious. Some times the inhabitants of a district join to make a prodigious oven—a pit 211 or 30 feet in eireum ferenee. the stones in which are heated by wood burned in it, and many hundred breadfruits are thrown in. and cooked at once. Baked in this manner, breadfruit will keep good for several weeks. Another mode of preserving it is by sub jecting it in heaps to a slight degree of fermenta tion, and beating it. into a kind of paste, which, although rather sour, is much used when fresh breadfruit cannot be obtained. There are nume• 0113 varieties of breadfruit tree in the South Sea Islands. and they ripen at different seasons, the most highly prized being seedless. The tree pro duces two, and sometimes throe, crops a year. In the %Vest Indies and South America, into which it has also been introduced, the breadfruit has not conic much into use as an ordinary article of food; but various preparations of it are reck oned delicacies. The fibrous inner hark of young breadfruit trees, beaten and prepared, is used for making a kind of cloth, which is much worn by the common people in the South Sea Islands, though inferior in softness and whiteness to that made from the Paper Thillierry. There exudes from the bark of the bread tree, when punctured, a thick, mucilaginous fluid, which hardens by ex posure to the air, and is used, when boiled with cocoanut oil, for making the seams of canoes, pails. etc.. water-tight, and as bird-lime. The timber is soft and light, of a rich yellow color, and assumes, when exposed to the air, the ap pearance of mahogany. It is used for canoes, house-building, furniture, and ninny other pur poses. It is durable when not exposed to the weather. The Jack tree (q.v.) or Jaen (.1rtocor pus integrifolia), and the Dephal (Artocarpus Inkoorha), both large East Indian trees, belong to the same genus with the breadfruit tree.