INLAND LOCALITIES FOR THE COCOA PALM. 2385 
and the voleanic soil furnished the alkalinity which the species appa- 
rently finds congenial on the seashore, and which it is unable to obtain 
in inland localities having a heavy rainfall. The cocoanut resembles 
the date in this preference for alkaline soils, but differs in being much 
more sensitive to extremes of temperature. 
The limited distribution of the great majority of the species of 
palms has already been remarked, so that there is nothing exceptional 
in the supposition that the cocoanut may have remained confined to a 
very small area until it made its way to the coast and was exploited by 
man as one of the few useful strand species. 
And notwithstanding the general opinion to the contrary, the cocoa- 
nut is not an exclusively littoral or sea level species. It flourishes, for 
example, at Bangalore, in the middle of the southern part of the Hin- 
dostan Peninsula, nearly 200 miles from the coast, and at an elevation 
of nearly 3,000 feet. In the region of the Ganges and Brahmaputra 
it has been carried inland 150 or 200 miles, and even to Patna and 
Lucknow, though at the latter place the nuts are said not to ripen. 
Pickering’s ** Races of Men” furnishes a statement that in semiarid 
Arabia the cocoanut is cultivated ‘tin the interior country back of 
Muscat.” According to Dr. Edward Palmer thousands of cocoanut 
palms are grown in the dry and somewhat elevated region about the 
city of Colima, Mexico, and it has also been reported at Merida, Yuca- 
tan. In none of these places, however, is there any indication that the 
tree is indigenous, and according to Seeman numerous unsuccessful 
attempts have been made to grow it in the central parts of the Isthmus 
of Panama. But it is in South America, the home of all the other 
species of Cocos, that we find the greatest probability of an indigenous 
inland existence of the cocoa palm. Cieza de Leon described in the 
first half of the sixteenth century palms from this region which may 
have been cocoanuts: 
The site is 23 leagues from the city of Cartago, 12 from the town of Anzerma, and 
1 from the great river, ona plain between two small rivers, and is surrounded by 
great palm trees, which are different from those T have already described, though 
more useful, for very savoury palmitos are taken from them, and their fruit is also 
savoury, for when it is broken with stones milk flows out, and they even make a 
kind of cream and butter from it, which they use for lighting lamps. 
Probably because of the general belief in the strictly littoral distri- 
bution of the cocoanut Markham has conjectured that this statement 
refers to Cerorylon andicola, a palm which Humboldt reported from 
the region of Cartago, but which grows on high declivities, not in the 
river plains. Moreover, it is the waxy secretion of the trunk of 
Ceroxylon which is burned, not a cream or butter made from a milk- 
producing fruit. The apparently unnecessary statement that ** their 
fruit is also savoury” doubtless implies a reference to the pixiuare 
