COOK—THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 819 
had more recent contacts with the Malayan and Melanesian races. 
This eastward movement into the Pacific explains the presence, even 
in the most eastern archipelagocs, of many seedless varieties of the 
breadfruit, banana, and other Malayan plants, and of an infusion of 
Papuan or Melanesian blood. Yet these later influences have not 
destroyed the essential likeness of the Polynesian and Malayan 
culture to that of ancient America. The general unity of the Malayo- 
Polynesian language and the similarily of the people and their cus- 
toms to those of the American Indians are more obvious in the 
remote islands, such as New Zealand, Easter Island, and Hawau, than 
in the equatorial archipelagoes, where the Melanesian influences are 
more apparent. The Polynesians have traditions and genealogies 
that refer to the introduction of the breadfruit as having taken place 
about eighty generations or two thousand years ago, but this eastward 
migration that carried the breadfruit need not have had any con- 
nection with the westward migration which carried the coconut into 
the Pacifie from America, and which probably took place at a much 
more ancient period. 
Nor is it necessary to believe that contacts of the islanders with 
America entirely ceased during the modern period of eastward migra- 
tion. The presence of the banana in pre-Spanish America forbids 
such an assumption. In addition to numerous traditions of the 
arrival of people from the seas, in Peru and elsewhere, there was the 
definitely reported historical incident of the black, frizzle-haired 
people of the Isthmus of Panama, which can hardly be explained 
except by supposing that a tribe of Polynesians had established 
themselves on the Isthmus when Balboa crossed it and discovered 
the Pacific Ocean. 
The origin of the coconut in America and its dissemination by 
human agency to the tropics of the Old World do not stand alone as 
botanical theories, but are in full accord with more recent and well- 
established discoveries in the fields of ethnology and archeology. 
It is now generally admitted by ethnologists that the ancient civiliza- 
tions of tropical America were of native, indigenous origin and not 
imported from abroad. In Egypt and Assyria, on the contrary, it 
does not appear that the earliest civilizations were indigenous. 
Recent discoveries make it possible to trace them back to the shores 
of the Persian Gulf and to southern Arabia, and to a seafaring exotic 
race, skilled in agriculture and navigation. 
That the primitive agricultural people who distributed the coconut 
and other American plants over the islands and shores of the Pacific 
and Indian oceans came originally from America is a possibility that 
appears worthy of careful consideration by students of botany and 
ethnology. The tropical contact of the two hemispheres was so 
remote in time, and the subsequent changes have been so great on 
