COOK—THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 333 
frequently cultivated in the interior, especially in the drier districts, but the natives 
do not seem to be so well acquainted with it as is the case in South America, and 
they have no special names to designate it. 
The palms shown in plate 52 (frontispiece) are growing in the city 
of Salama near the geographical center of Guatemala. The broad 
valley or plateau in which Salama is situated has an altitude of 
900 meters, and has a distinctly desert climate, but the coconut 
prospers apparently as well as on the seashore. The leaves are not 
as large as usual in coast-grown palms (compare with pl. 65), but 
this is in accordance with a very general principle of plant growth, 
that plants produce smaller leaves under the stronger light and more 
rapid transpiration afforded by desert conditions. 
The coconut is also planted with success in other dry valleys in 
Guatemala, notably in that of Cajabon (pl. 66, fig. 2). It is a curious 
fact that in several of these places the prosperity of the palms is 
coincident with the prevalence of goiter, a disease commonly sup- 
posed to be associated with alkaline water, which might be an advan- 
tage to the palms. 
In eastern Guatemala, near Livingston, the coconut palm has 
given an apparent illustration of its requirement of salt by refusing 
to grow within a few rods of the ocean on slopes moistened only by 
fresh water. The nature of the soil and the water supply will prob- 
ably be found to constitute a very large factor in all such cases. 
The palms thrive much better in the town of Livingston, built on a 
part of the same slope where the agricultural production of coconuts 
appears to have failed (pl. 54, fig. 2, facing p. 299). Proximity tothe sea 
is not enough without the right conditions of the soil. Other tropical 
tree crops, such as coffee and cacao, often thrive under dooryard cultiva- 
tion in districts where agricultural production is much less success- 
ful. Even at Panzos, 90 miles from the sea, coconuts are still able 
to grow in the yards about the houses.¢ 
The dryness of the interior valleys of Guatemala, and the alkalinity 
of their scant water supplies, are to a large extent artificial conditions 
induced by the long-continued presence of agricultural populations 
and the consequent destruction of the forests and denudation of the 
@ An instance where proximity to the sea enabled palms to thrive in otherwise 
unfavorable soil is given in Spons’ Encyclopedia: 
‘*Coco-nuts growing in mangrove soil on the side of creeks, and more or less saturated 
with salt, have their milk brackish, and the sap is saline also. These trees do not 
suffer from the atiacks of the rhinoceros beetle, and are found to bear much sooner 
than those planted on a sandy soil. As an illustration of this, while trees planted at 
Penang thirty years ago, on sandy soil, have not yet borne fruit—although they are 
fine-looking trees—others in the same plantation, only 10 years old, but on low ground, 
where the sea tide comes up daily, washes their roots, and runs off again, are in full 
bearing, giving 50—100 nuts annually, and the kernel is as thick as that of nuts grown 
on sandy soil, and produces as much oil.”’ 
