highland Colombia, /u/o. The convenient epithet cocona 
followed the plant in its several introductions and has 
now, in the literature, been accepted as a standard com- 
mon name. Unfortunately, however, cocona was errone- 
ously identified and, in agricultural institutions as well 
asin the scientific and popular literature, was determined 
as representing Solanwm hyporhodium A. Br. et Bouché. 
This error was corrected in 1958 (Schultes, R. E.: ‘A 
little known cultivated plant from northern South Amer- 
ica” in Bot. Mus. Leafl. Harvard Univ. 18 (1958) 229- 
244). 
Solanum Topiro has never apparently been collected 
from the wild, and we have never seen it outside of agri- 
cultural plots or abandoned house-sites which obviously 
had been the scene of cultivation. We probably have at 
hand in this plant a species so long in association with 
man that it may nowadays exist only because of this asso- 
ciation. The fruit yields viable seeds in great abundance, 
but the plants seem to reproduce themselves only in 
highly disturbed and sunny sites. 
The Indians eat the ripe fruit as a tomato. The civi- 
lized inhabitants of the region use the fresh fruits to pre- 
pare, with sugar, a rather acidulous, thirst-quenching 
drink. ‘The plant is apparently never set out deliberately 
but springs up from seeds adhering to the rind when this 
is cast into refuse heaps or when inedible parts of the fruit 
are spat out inthe process of eating. The species is grown 
over a wide area including much of forested eastern Peru, 
most of the Amazon drainage-area of Colombia, the up- 
per reaches of the Orinoco system in Venezuela and prob- 
ably to a much lesser extent adjacent parts of Brazil. 
We gratefully acknowledge important help in biblio- 
graphic matters from Mrs. Julia Morton of the Morton 
Collectanea. 
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