284 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 
tops of the cocoanut are not only unprotected, but are apparently rel- 
ished by cattle, against which nurseries and young plantations must 
be fenced 
The presence of tae cocoa palm only about actual human habitations 
and its complete absence from the forests of Guatemala is brought 
forward by Stoll! as a reason for denying the existence of the species 
among the Indians by whom many of the now wooded areas were 
formerly thickly populated. It is evident, however, from what has 
already been said that such an inference is quite unwarranted. What- 
ever might be the possibilities of the cocoanut if cast up on a newly 
emerged volcanic or coral island, it may be accepted as certain that it 
can not withstand unassisted the competition of an ordinary tropical 
flora of vines, shrubs, and trees. Such arguments as that of Stoll 
prove, in fact, too much; for few things can be more certain than that 
many settlements have been made and abandoned in the coast districts 
of Guatemala within the last four centuries, and the complete disap- 
pearance of the cocoanuts, if a fact, furnishes emphatic testimony to 
the dependence of the species upon man, but gives us no inkling con- 
cerning its presence or absence among the pre-Columbian Indians of 
this or any other region. 
THE ORIGINAL HABITAT OF THE COCOA PALM. 
But if the littoral distribution of the cocoanut is the result of human 
effort, where did the natural development of the species take place 
The literature of tropical agriculture abounds in statements to the 
effect that the cocoanut is strictly a shore plant, and the botanist 
Spruce, one of the ablest students of palms, held this opinion and 
believed in a Pacific origin. 
The cultivation of the cocoanut is limited to the regions bordering the Atlantic 
and Pacific oceans. As we ascend the Amazon it gradually becomes sterile. At 
Manaos, 800 miles up, the fruits appear fully formed externally, but are invariably 
empty. At San Carlos del Rio Negro, almost exactly midway between the two 
oceans, there were, in 1854, two well-grown cocoa palms which had never even 
flowered? 
Nevertheless, 1t is now well known that many plants which were 
formerly supposed to belong strictly to the strand vegetation of 
oceanic coasts are also to be found in elevated regions. "Thus Schimper 
has shown that in Java many strand species reappear on the volcanic 
mountains of that island, though absent from the intervening forest 
belt. Though this possibility seems never to have been considered, 
there is nothing violently improbable in the idea that the original 
home of the cocoanut was in some of the sheltered valleys of the equa- 
torial Andes where elevation moderated and equalized the temperature, 
‘Guatemala, p. 117, (Leipzig, 1886). 
2 Journ. Linn. Soc. London, vol. 11, p. 80 (1871). 
