REPORTS OF WILD COCOA PALMS, 281 
Recent testimony is no less definite and emphatic: 
It is to be emphasized that all cocoanuts are planted; the idea of a wild palin being 
as strange in Funafuti as that of a wild peach might be in England, Gill, in deserib- 
ing the primeval forest of the uninhabited island of Nassau in 1862, alludes to but 
one cocoanut tree among the indigenous vegetation. I doubt whether, despite 
popular opinion to the contrary, a wild cocoanut palm is to be found throughout the 
breadth of the Pacific. Certainly it is most rare, again contrary to popular theory, 
for a drifted cocoanut thrown upon the beach by winds and waves to produce a tree. 
So intimately is this palm now associated with native life that it is difficult to imag- 
ine an atoll before its introduction.! 
That the Polynesians were not accustomed to expect cocoanuts on 
uninhabited islands is further indicated by the existence of a myth* 
in which the progenitor of the inhabitants of Humphrey Island, to 
the northward of the Society Group, is said to have introduced the 
cocoa palm by planting a nut picked up at sea. The Marquesas island- 
ers believed that the cocoanut was introduced from the eastward by 
one of their gods.* 
To these testimonies may be added the statements of Woodford," 
who made a careful investigation of the conditions existing in the 
Solomon Group. 
Many of them have small patches of cocoanut trees, a sure sign of frequent native 
attention, as, from repeated observations, | am convinced that cocoanut palms will 
rarely grow, and certainly will not bear fruit, unless attended to and kept clear of 
overgrowing trees. 
Cocoanuts are an infallible sign of present or recent habitation. When cocoanuts 
are left to themselves the young trees become speedily choked by the bush that 
grows up round them and can consequently bear no fruit, so that, as the old trees 
die, there are no young ones to replace them. 
In his general discussion De Candolle appears to have given consid- 
erable weight to the fact that several botanists have reported the 
cocoanut as growing wild in the East Indies, while only Seeman claims 
to have seen it in that state in America. But such reports of the 
finding of cultivated species in the wild state can easily be taken too 
seriously. There are all gradations between plants which exist only 
in cultivation and those which are able to escape and establish them- 
selves with the smallest opportunity. In the Tropics the distinction 
between wild and cultivated often quite fades out, and especially with 
trees, since these are generally so much more permanent than the 
traces of human habitation, while at the same time the botanical col- 
lector usually has little time and less skill for finding the latter. 
Throughout the moist Tropics it is possible, for instance, to find wild 
bananas—that is, bananas growing without human assistance. And 
1 Hedley, Memoir II, Australian Museum, Sydney, p. 22 (1896). 
2Gill, Myth and Songs from the South Pacific, 72 to 74, quoted by Guppy, Journ. 
Trans. Victoria Inst., vol. 25, p. 46 (1889-90). . 
3 Porter’s Cruise in the Pacific Ocean, vol. 2, p. 54 (Philadelphia, 1850). 
*«\ Naturalist among the Head-Hunters,” pp. 194, 210 (London, 1890). 
