6 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 
Velasco, in his eagerness to vindicate his country’s claim to the ‘ Hatun-Chonta,” 
or great palm, as the Indians call it, gets very angry with those who dispute it. 
“One may see,”’ he says, “with what levity some authors relate a thousand false- 
hoods like Francisco Hernandez, a native of Mexico, who in his Latin history 
asserts that “ocos were transplanted from the East to the West Indies by the Span- 
iands; whereas on their first arrival they found cocos laden with fruit, which is never 
Seen on stems less than from 16 to 20 years old.”’ 
INTRODUCTION TO ATLANTIC COASTS. 
The theory of the Spanish introduction of the cocoanut to America 
has been supported by references to Sloane, Martius, Piso, Maregraf, 
and others, who give more or less distinct testimony to the effect that 
the Spaniards and Portuguese introduced it into Jamaica, Guiana, 
Brazil, and West Africa. But no discredit to these witnesses is im- 
plied in the supposition that the cocoanuts were not brought from 
Spain, where there were none, but from the American continent, 
where we have such excellent reasons for believing that there were 
many. ‘The numerous Spanish expeditions to Mexico, Central America, 
and Peru were accustomed to make long visits for refitting their ships, 
both going and coming, at Santo Domingo and Jamaica. What would 
be more natural than that the early colonists would secure cocoanuts 
in this way, as well as cacao and other plants which they had from the 
American mainland / 
AMERICAN NAMES OF THE COCOANUT, 
The origin of the name cocoa or coco, as the earlier writers used it, 
seems to have remained quite as obscure as that of the tree itself, 
Oviedo refers to the fruit of several species of palms as ‘* cocos,” and 
seems to have been the first to record the fanciful idea that that word 
was applied to the cocoanut-because the three foramina or “eyes” 
suggest the grimace of monkey, a notion which Hernandez and 
many subsequent writers have ascribed to the Portuguese, and 
some lexicographers have derived coco from a Portugese name for 
monkey, macaco or macoco. Others have thought to trace it to the 
Greek cot«z(Louk/), and even to an ancient Keyptian word Auku, which 
was formerly thought to apply to the cocoanut: and although Seeman 
furnished in L868 excellent reasons for believing that at least the 
Egyptian reference does not apply to the cocoanut, but to Borassus 
aethiopum,' the Eeyptian theory is still repeated in the latest editions 
of our most popular dictionaries. Nor did anybody attempt to show 
that either Hernandez, Acosta, or any of their contemporaries was 
acquainted with either the Greek or the Keyptian words, or that they 
were familiar with the cocoanut before coming to America. Hernan. 
Flora Vitiensis, pp. 275-278.  Borassus aehiopum stands in the Index Kewensis as 
a synonym of B. flabellifer of the East Indies. Drude admits (Engler and Prantl, 
Natirlichen Pflanzenfamilien) but one species of Borassus, distributed in cultivation, 
from Senegambia to Ceylon, Hindustan, and the Sunda Islands. 
