PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 429 



The Telinga name, arek, is the origin of the botanical 

 name Areca. 



Elaeis — Elceis gidneensis, Jacquin. 



Travellers who visited the coast of Guinea in the first 

 half of the sixteenth century ^ already noticed this palm, 

 from which the negroes extracted oil by pressing the 

 fleshy part of the fruit. The tree is indigenous on all 

 that coast.^ It is also planted, and the exportation of 

 palm-oil is the object of an extensive trade. As it is 

 also found wild in Brazil and perhaps in Guiana,^ a doubt 

 arose as to the true origin. It" seems the more likely to 

 be American that the only other species which with this 

 one constitutes the genus Elceis belongs to New Granada.'^ 

 Robert Brown, however, and the authors who have 

 studied the family of palms, are unanimous in their belief 

 that Elceis gidneensis was introduced into America by 

 the negroes and slave-traders in the trafiic between the 

 Guinea coast and the coast of America. Many facts 

 confirm, this opinion. The first botanists who visited 

 Brazil, Piso and Marcgraf and others, do not mention the 

 Elseis. It is only found on the littoral, from Rio di 

 Janeiro to the mouth of the Amazon, never in the interior. 

 It is often cultivated, or has the appearance of a species 

 escaped from the plantations. Sloane,^ who explored 

 Jamaica in the seventeenth century, relates that this 

 tree was introduced in his time into a plantation which 

 he names, from the coast of Guinea. It has since become 

 naturalized in some of the West India Islands.^ 



Cocoa-nut Palm — Cocos mucifera, Linnseus. 



The cocoa-nut palm is perhaps, of all tropical trees, the 

 one which yields the greatest variety of products. Its 



* Da Mosto, in Ramusio, i. p. 104, quoted by R. Bro-wn. 

 ^ Brown, Bot. of Congo, p. 55. 



' Mai'tius, Hist Nat. Palmarum, ii. p. 62; Drude, in Fl. Bra.sil.,faaG. 

 85, p. 457. I find no author who asserts that this palm is wild in Guiana, 

 as Martius affirms it to be in Brazil. 



* Elceis melanocarpa, G^ertner. The fruit also contains oil, but it 

 does not appear that the species is cultivated, as the number of oleaginous 

 plants is considerable in all countries. 



^ Sloane, Nat. Hist, of Jamaica, ii. p. 113. 



« Grisebach, Flora of Brit. W. Ind. Is., p. 522. 



