HISTORY OF THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 
By O. F. Coox. 
INTRODUCTION. 
Many scientific text-books and works of reference support the 
popular idea that the coconut palm is specially adapted to tropical 
seacoasts and is confined to maritime regions. No other example of 
special adaptations of plants to their environments has had longer 
currency or more confident belief. Nevertheless, it seems that the 
botanical romance of the coconut, protected by its thick husk and 
floated from island to island in advance of human habitation, must 
go the way of many other pleasing traditions. What natural agencies 
have been supposed to do for the coconut is now to be recognized 
as the work of primitive man. The truth proves again to be stranger 
than the fiction. 
The coconut exists in the lowland tropics only as a product of 
cultivation. It does not plant or maintain or distribute itself on 
tropical seacoasts, and would entirely disappear from maritime local- 
ities if human care were withdrawn. The habits of the palm from 
the botanical standpoint, its significance in human history, and even 
its agricultural possibilities are misunderstood unless we are able to 
lay aside the maritime tradition. 
An outline of the evidence for the American origin of the coconut 
palm and of its distribution by human agencies has been published 
in a previous number of the Contributions.* The present study car- 
ries the subject further in two principal directions. It brings addi- 
tional facts to show that the coconut palm was already widely dis- 
tributed in the New World before the arrival of the Europeans, and 
that it is not naturally a maritime or humid tropical species, but a 
native of drier and more temperate plateau regions in South America. 
A comparison of the habits of germination of the coconut with those 
of other related American palms shows other and very different uses 
@The Origin and Distribution of the Cocoa Palm, Contributions from the National 
Herbarium, vol. 7, pp. 257-293. (1901.) 
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