COOK—-THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 297 
personally communicated by Dr. W. E. Inksetter, of Alajuela, Costa 
Rica. A coconut, with the husk intact, was found on the beach in 
the island of Ronsay, in the Orkney group, to the north of Scotland, 
in the winter of 1892-93. Doctor Inksetter saw the nut and drank 
some of the milk, which was still in good condition. 
But of what advantage is such transportation if the nut encounters 
unfavorable conditions when it lands, and thus fails to germinate or 
to grow to maturity and establish its seedlings in turn? We should 
find on some tropical coast a place where the palms thrive and 
multiply, where we find old palms surrounded by flourishing young 
ones, growing spontaneously, without the aid of man, but no such 
instance has been reported. Instances of floating nuts or of sup- 
posedly self-sown palms indicate the opposite of what they are some- 
times thought to prove, for the failure of the palms to persist is only 
emphasized by showing that opportunitics have been ample. There 
seems to be no authentic record of coco palms establishing and 
maintaining themselves on any tropical coast m a wild or truly 
spontaneous condition, A palm that is unable to maintain itself 
on the land has nothing to gain by having its nuts drifted about by 
the sea. 
The complete absence of coconuts from the extensive tropical 
coast line of Australia until planted by European colonists has 
already been cited as a gigantic experiment showing that the coconut 
did not establish itself without human, help, even in a place where it 
afterwards thrived in cultivation. It is known that the shores of 
Australia were visited yearly by many Malay fishing boats carrying 
large quantities of coconuts among their food supplies. Many nuts 
have also been found cast up on the tropical beach of Australia. 
The palms exist in large numbers on small islands in the Torres 
Straits, only 30 or 40 miles from the Australian coast. The contrast 
between these palm-covered islands and the palmless shores of Aus- 
tralia has made a strong impression upon eyewitnesses, 
Murray Island is about 700 feet high at its highest point, and consists of steep 
broken ground. Its whole aspect is singularly different from any part of Australia, 
since the whole of its lower portion, and a good part even of the hills, is covered by a 
continuous grove of cocoa-nut trees. The entire absence of these trees from every part 
of Australia is a most striking fact, since it is, I believe, the only country in the world 
so much of which lies within the Tropics in which they have never been found. We 
had once or twice found cocoa-nuts on the beach, still more or less fresh; and here is 
an island, absolutely within the Great Barrier reef, completely covered by them, 
and yet neither by Flinders, King, Wickham, Stokes, or ourselyes have any trees 
been discovered anywhere upon the mainland. We could perceive many natives 
on the beach of Murray Island, as also a nearly continuous line of large dome-shaped 
