COOK—THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 815 
extensively cultivated in Porto Rico under the native name yautia, 
are still commonly called cocos in Jamaica. 
Peter Martyr used the word coceos in his ninth Decade in deserib- 
ing coconuts in the East Indies (Coccos appellant fructus illos . . .), 
but no modern writer seems to have recorded the word as a native 
East Indian name of the coconut. None of the numerous names 
civen in Watt’s Dictionary of the Keonomic Products of India and 
in Wallace’s vocabularies of thirty-three languages of the Malay 
Archipelago has any apparent resemblance to coco, unless it be copra, 
the East Indian name of the dried meat. 
Some authorities note an ancient Egyptian word as the original 
of the Greck kouki of Theophrastus and the Latin euci of Pliny. 
Seemann denies that the Egyptian kouki referred to the coconut, 
but applies if to a native African fan palm, Borassus, It is also 
possible to identify the ewciophoron of Theophrastus with the doum 
palm of Upper Egypt (Lyphaene).* Indeed, the word ‘‘kouk”” is 
still to be heard in the bazaars of Cairo as the name of the horny 
endosperm of the doum palm, commonly used for making the beads 
of rosaries, and other small objects. 
Some etymologists would assimilate owki with kokkos, a general 
Greek word for fruit, berry, or seed, the same as the Latin coccus. 
The word coccus seems to have come into Latin as the name of the 
Kermes insect (Coccus ilicis) that yielded the scarlet dye, rather than 
as the name of a seed or a berry. Nevertheless, we find among later 
post-Columbian writers of botanical Latin, such as Piso, the expres- 
sion Coceus Indica taking the place of Nua Indica as the name of the 
true coconut and Coccus Medica or Coccus Maldivica, instead of Nux 
Medica or Nux Maldivensium. Eden’s English translation of Oviedo 
shows the word cocus; Oviedo himself adhered consistently to coco, 
except as he wrote cocos in the plural number, as in the heading of 
his chapter. Linnus, in his older works, such as the Hortus Clif- 
fortianus and the Flora Zeylanica, also used the generic name Coccus. 
The change to Cocos seems to have been made in the first edition of 
the Species Plantarum (1753) without any previous author being 
indicated as having used the name in this form. The fourth edition 
of Genera Plantarum (1752) uses the old spelling Coccus, but the 
fifth edition (1754) adopts the new form Cocos. 
The Latin and Greek derivations that have been invented for the 
word may have quite as little basis in fact as the fanciful theory given 
by Oviedo, and repeated by many later writers, that the name was 
suggested by the resemblance of the base of the shell to the face of a 
monkey. ‘The Spanish language has a verb cocar, meaning to make 
faces like a monkey, and even a noun coco, meaning ogre or bugbear, 
aGreene, Edw. L., Landmarks of botanical history, pt. 1, Smiths. Misc. Coll, 
vol. 54, p. 182. (1909.) 
