17, 4 Merrill: Comments on Cook’s Theory 379 
distribution. We later read: “As with the coconut palm and the 
sweet potato, the maho figures more prominently among the 
Polynesians than among the natives of tropical America, al- 
though the American origin of the plant is even more clearly 
indicated” [italics mine]. The paragraph headings “A wild 
plant in America” and “A cultivated plant in the Old World” 
emphasize the fact that the authors are unacquainted with the 
plant as it occurs in the Old World. All botanists familiar with 
this common species as it occurs in the vast Indo-Malayan region 
will at once realize that the last paragraph heading is exceed- 
ingly misleading. 
They concede that the plant is wild and of wide distribution in 
tropical America, a region with which they are familiar, where 
it grows naturally along the seashore; but they make the most 
curious general claim that it is a cultivated plant in the Tropics 
of the Old World, a region they have apparently never visited. 
They admit that in some Polynesian islands it grows sponta- 
neously and covers large areas that have been abandoned after 
previous cultivation, and that low banks of tidal rivers are its 
favorite habitat. They do not, however, accept the statements 
made by numerous botanists, many of whom were familiar with 
the plant in its native habitat in the Old World, that it is a 
pantropic strand plant. Their theory regarding Hibiscus tilia- 
ceus is apparently based largely on the fact that they know the 
species from personal observation to be a native strand plant 
in tropical America, plus the statement in various published 
works that it is cultivated in Polynesia, and the assumption that 
it is also cultivated in other parts of the Old World Tropics. This 
being so, they could then reason its transmission by man from 
the New to the Old World, and interpret various data in support 
of that hypothesis. 
As a matter of fact, outside of Polynesia the species is never 
cultivated in the Tropics of the Old World, although one occasion- 
ally finds individual trees planted inland for ornamental pur- 
poses, while on the islands of the Pacific its cultivation is by 
no means universal; for here, as elsewhere, it is of wide natural 
distribution along the seashore, and on many islands (Guam 
for example) it occurs in enormous quantities forming grega- 
rious thickets near the sea. In tropical Asia and Malaya the 
plant is not of sufficiently great economic importance to warrant 
its cultivation, and in these vast regions it is certainly not a 
species that has purposely been disseminated by man, in either 
prehistoric or historic times. On some Pacific islands it occurs 
