27S ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 
in Florida, there are people on hand to plant them as they come ashore, 
this means of extending the distribution of the species may be very 
effective. In fact, there seems to be but one instance on record where 
living cocoanuts are known to have floated to a remote island, and 
even in this the possibility of shipwreck is by no means excluded, 
since oaken timbers were also cast up on the same island about the 
same time. 
The philosopher Francis Leguat and his unfortunate companions, who were, in 
the year 1690, the first inhabitants of the small island of Rodriguez, which lies 100 
leagues to the eastward of the Isle of France, found no cocoa trees in it. But pre- 
cisely at the period of their short residence there the sea threw upon the coast sey- 
eral cocoanuts in a state of germination, as if it had been the intention of Providence 
to induce them, by this useful and seasonable present, to remain on that island and 
to cultivate it. 
Francis Leguat, who was unacquainted with the relations which seeds have to the 
element in which they are designed to grow, was very much astonished to find that 
those fruits, which weighed from 5 to 6 pounds, must have performed a journey of 60 
or fourscore leagues without being corrupted. He took it for granted—and he was 
in the right—that they’ came from the island of. St. drande, which is situated to 
the northeast of Rodriguez. Those two desert islands had not. as yet, from the 
creation of the world, communicated to cach other all their vegetables, though situ- 
ated in a current of the ocean which sets in alternately, in the course of one year, 
for six months toward the one and six months toward the other. 
However this may be, they planted those cocoanuts, which, in the space of a year 
and a half, sent out shoots of 4 feet in height. A blessing from Heaven so distinctly 
marked had not the power of detaining them in that happy island. An inconsid- 
erate desire of procuring for themselyes women constrained them to abandon it, 
notwithstanding the remonstrances of Leguat, and plunged them into a long series 
of calamities, which few of them were able to survive. For my own part T can 
entertain no doubt had they reposed that confidence in Providence which they had 
reason to do its care would have conveyed wives for them to that desert island, as 
it had sent to them the gift of the cocoanut.! 
But, in spite of the quaintness of the language and the piety of the 
argument, we must not overlook the fact that in the desert island, as in 
Florida, there were men on hand who knew what to do with the 
cocoanuts, which had hitherto been unable to establish themselves. 
FAILURE OF MARITIME DISTRIBUTION IN AUSTRALIA, 
History and anthropology, and the distribution of seedless. culti- 
vated plants such as the sweet potato, taro, banana, and breadfruit, 
testify to extensive and sustained human communications und migra- 
tions throughout the islands of the Pacific and the Malay region, so 
that no antecedent improbability attaches to a belief in the dissemina- 
tion of the cocoanut by man. And yet those who have cherished the 
theory of ocean winds and currents might still insist on the efliciency 
of these means of dispersion were it not for the fact that the continent 
‘St. Pierre’s Botanical Harmony, p. 87. (Translated by IHlunter, Worcester, 
Mass., 1797.) 
