288 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 
of the Pacific is a matter of a few centuries only.’ Seeman had already 
dismissed the idea of an American origin of the cocoa palm, but find- 
ing it unreasonable to believe that both the Polynesians and the cocoa- 
nut came from Asia, he was impelled to raise the question whether the 
direction of the Polynesian migration has not been misinterpreted. 
The light-skinned Polynesians are assumed to be of a Malay stock, and to have 
migrated somewhere from Eastern Asia... . Did these Polynesians leave the 
cradle of their race before the cocoanut tree had found its way to it? Or are we to 
assume that they have migrated with the trade wind rather than against it; that 
Malayan Asia was peopled from Polvnesia rather than Polynesia from Malayan Asia? 
And even if it be admitted that the Polynesians have never been in 
Asia, other facts remain which can scarcely be explained except by 
supposing that the cocoanut also passed from east .o west. At the 
time of Captain Cook’s visit Forster found two names at Tahiti con- 
nected with the Gocoanut palin, v/a for the fruit and vr for the tree. 
Although this distinetion is often lost in the islands to the westward, 
vet both names in numerous modifications have a very wide distribu- 
tion throughout the Pacific, the Malay region, Hindustan, Arabia, and 
Madagascar. The word v/a becomes v/og in the Philippines, and in 
other localities suffers a vast number of other changes, of which the 
following samples may suflice: nu, niuh, njo, nieor, nieo, niau, nikau, 
njog, nivel, niwer, niyur, nidjoe, nieh, nicoéra, njioer, noohhoe, and 
S: 
nijor. The other term «77 is supposed to be represented in various 
Polynesian groups by haari, hari, erei, and akari, and has been con- 
jectured to be the original of the Maori /a/ar7, and may well be the 
root of the Arabie Aare/, and the extremely numerous Hindustan forms 
like nari, naril, narel, narjil, nardjil, and narikel. It can scarcely 
be denied that the existence of such series of names, when used for 
the same product by peoples separated by thousands of miles and dif- 
fering totally in racial characteristics, languages, and customs, affords 
another proof that the cocoa palm was not distributed by the waves, 
but by human beings engaged in colonization or commerce. 
' This idea has undoubtedly been fostered by the fact that the occupation of many 
of the small coral islands and groups of the Pacific is obviously recent, as must, indeed, 
be the case where the land itself has existed for only a few centuries. Thus islands 
of the Ellice Group, to the north of Fiji, were settled in historic times from the 
Gilbert Group, still farther to the north. It is also of interest to note that the cocoa- 
nuts are also known to have been introduced from the north and that the natives 
make toddy and do not use kava, facts which are used by ethnologists to show that 
the people of the Gilbert Group were derived from Micronesia and not from Melane- 
sia or Polynesia. According to Captain Moresby the Papuans of the coasts and 
islands explored by him in 1873 used neither toddy nor Kava. 
‘We never saw any intoxicating drink among the Papuans, and were struck by 
thepeculiarity, as the making of ava is general amongst the South Sea Islanders.”’ 
See Moresby, Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the D’ Entrecasteaux 
Islands, p. 324. (London, 1876. ) 
