The Editor: Origin of the Date Pai 



499 



SEEDS OF THE AMERICAN DATE PALM 



These fossil seeds were recentlyjfound in a Tertiary deposit 

 of Texas, and give the first indication that the date 

 palm, now confined to the eastern hemisphere, was at 

 one time an inhabitant of America. They are con- 

 siderably larger than the f seeds of most commercial 

 varieties of date known at the present day, but can 

 be matched by seeds of occasional palms which have 

 grown from seed, and show reversion. After Berry. 

 (Fig. 6.) 



scanty rainfall, close to the sea or some 

 other body of salt water, this being a 

 necessary condition to furnish the moist 

 but saline subsoil for which the palm is 

 evidently adapted. "This region," he 

 concludes, "can only be sought to the 

 west of India, in Southern Persia or on 

 the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf. 

 "To locate the original home of a 

 cultivated plant, however, and to admit 

 that it exists there today, are two 

 different things. 



WILD FORM not KNOWN. 



"It is my belief that the date palm 

 can not be found today in a wild state, 

 because the nutritive qualities of its 

 fruit are so great and the natural pro- 

 tection afforded to the flowers and 

 vegetative parts is so slight, that it 

 could not exist except by the aid of 

 man. . . . The date palm can not 

 be found except linked to the white 

 human race. . . . No one should under- 

 estimate the importance which it must 

 have exercised on the populations among 

 which it prospered, in the preponder- 

 ance which such populations were able 

 to attain over others, as a result of the 

 nutritious food, wholesome and plentiful, 

 which the date palm furnished them." 



But the recent discovery in a Tertiary 

 deposit of eastern Texas of fossil dates 

 has brought in an entirely new phase 

 of the question, and strikingly illus- 



trated the danger which surrounds all 

 attempts to speculate on the data 

 presented by systematic botany. Even 

 scientists who looked on the western 

 hemisphere as the original home of 

 agriculture have never, so far as I know, 

 suggested that the date palm was one 

 of the products which America has 

 furnished the world; yet the find of 

 dates dating back several millions of 

 years throws the burden of proof on 

 those who would now hold otherwise. 



The discovery of these remains was 

 announced by Edward W. Berry of 

 Johns Hopkins University in the Ameri- 

 can Journal of Science (May, 1914). 

 He writes: 



' ' The considerable range of species of 

 Phoenix-like palms in the south Euro- 

 pean Tertiary has led to the expecta- 

 tion of their discovery in our more 

 tropical southern Tertiaries when these 

 should have been thoroughly explored, 

 just as the Bread-fruit, Cinnamon tree 

 and Nipa-Palm have been found ; never- 

 theless, the actual proof of the former 

 existence of a date palm in the Western 

 Hemisphere is one of the more spectacu- 

 lar incidents of the paleobotanists' 

 work, since it is likely to attract more 

 attention from botanists and geologists 

 engrossed in their own special lines of 

 study than a tome of admirable de- 

 scriptive paleobotanical work. In order 

 that the presence of the date palm in 



