804 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL HERBARIUM. 
The rattans and other climbing palms that produce slender, long- 
jointed trunks are able to outgrow other vegetation, but all the palms 
that form thick, short-jointed trunks suffer the same disadvantage 
as the coconut. They are unable to compete with other quick- 
growing forms of vegetation that cover and smother young palms 
before they can escape by the building of trunks. 
The coconut must be reckoned among the palms that are unable 
to develop without full exposure to sunlight. The seedling plants 
attain a considerable size in locations that are partially shaded, but 
this apparent growth arises from the nourishment stored in the huge 
seed. Large amounts of sunlight appear to be necessary to enable 
young coconut palms to make any independent growth. This intol- 
erance of shade is a fact of primary importance in the study of the 
coconut, either from the botanical or from the agricultural standpoint. 
It explains why coconuts are not able to establish themselves as wild 
plants in any of the wide tropical regions of low elevation in which 
they are cultivated, 
SOUTH AMERICAN ORIGIN OF THE COCONUT PALM. 
As soon as we recognize that the coconut is unable to establish 
itself or even to maintain its existence on any tropical seacoast, we 
are no longer at liberty to believe that the species originated in 
maritime situations. It becomes evident that the home of the plant 
must be sought in interior localities where the young palms could 
escape competition with the more luxuriant types of tropical vege- 
tation. While we imagine that the coconut can be disseminated by 
ocean currents to any part of the Tropics, it seems hopeless to fix 
upon any particular coast line as the original home of the species, but 
when we understand that the species must have originated in an 
interior locality the problem of origin is immediately simplified and 
very definite conclusions can be reached. 
If the coconut could be submitted as a new natural object to a 
specialist familiar with all other known palms, he would without 
hesitation recognize it as a product of America, since all of the score 
of related genera, including about three hundred species, are Amer- 
ican.© With equal confidence the specialist would assign the coconut 
«The only member of the family Cocaceae that has an extra-American distribution 
is the African oil palm, Elacis guineensis, a species rather closely related to the Amer- 
ican Llaeis melanococca. Even in this case the idea of maritime distribution has 
become unnecessary. The African oil palm has been found in Brazil in an apparently 
wild state, and may have originated in that country. Dr. I’. H. Knowlton, of the 
U.S. Geological Survey, has showed me seeds of the African oil palm which were 
taken from an albatross shot off the west coast of Africa by the United States Eclipse 
Expedition of 1889-90, The powers of flight of the albatross are such as to render it a 
much more effective agent of distribution than the ocean currents. Moreover, the oil 
palm does not behave as a littoral species, like the coconut. 
