PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 431 



region, where it is apparently of no great importance. 

 More common in Madagascar and on the east coast, it 

 is not, however, named in several works on the plants of 

 Zanzibar, the Seychelles, Mauritius, etc., perhaps because 

 it is considered as cultivated in these parts. 



Evidently the species is not of African origin, nor of 

 the eastern part of tropical America. Eliminating these 

 countries, there remain western tropical America, the 

 islands of the Pacific, the Indian Archipelago, and the 

 south of Asia, where the tree abounds with every appear- 

 ance of being more or less wild and long established. 



The navigators Dampier and Vancouver^ found it 

 at the beginning of the seventeenth century, forming 

 woods in the islands near Panama, not on the mainland, 

 and in the isle of Cocos, situated at three hundred miles 

 from the continent in the Pacific. At that time these 

 islands were uninhabited. Later the cocoa-nut palm was 

 found on the western coast from Mexico to Peru, but 

 usually authors do not say that it was wild, excepting 

 Seemann,^ however, who saw this palm both wild and 

 cultivated on the Isthmus of Panama. According to 

 Hernandez,^ in the sixteenth century the Mexicans caUed 

 it coyolli, a word which does not seem to be native. 



Oviedo,'* writing in 1526, in the first years of the con- 

 quest of Mexico, says that the cocoa-nut palm was abun- 

 dant on the coast of the Pacific in the province of the 

 Cacique Chiman, and he clearly describes the species. 

 This does not prove the tree to be wild. In southern 

 Asia, especially in the islands, the cocoa-nut is both wild 

 and cultivated. The smaller the islands, and the lower 

 and the more subject to the influence of the sea air, the 

 more the cocoa-nut predominates and attracts the atten- 

 tion of travellers. Some take their name from the tree, 

 among others two islands close to the Andamans and one 

 near Sumatra. 



^ Vafer, Voyage de Dampier; edit. 1705, p. 186 ; Yancouver, French 

 edit., p. 325, quoted by de Martins, Hist. Nat. Palmarum, i. p. 188. 



2 Seemann, Bot. of Herald., p. 204. 



^ Hernandez, Thesaurus Mexic, p. 71. He attributes the same name, 

 p. 75, to the cocoa-nut palm of the Philippine Islands. 



* Oviedo, Ramusio's trans., ill. p. 53. 



