ON THE DISPERSAL OF PLANTS. 269 
1836, remarked that the cocoa-nut tree seemed at the first 
glance to compose the whole wood. In truth, however, we 
learn from the early edition of Horsburgh’s Jndia Directory, 
which was published in 1809, some 15 or 16 years before 
the occupation of these islands, that they were “covered 
with trees, principally the cocoa-tree,” and that the navigators 
who had previously landed here had found “no article of 
utility except cocoa-nuts.” Long before this date, in 1749, 
when Captain Ekeberg visited North Keeling Island, he 
described “the whole strand” as “full of cocoa-nut trees,” 
whilst the northern shore of the adjacent islands of Keeling 
Atoll he referred to in hisjournal as “ overgrown with cocoa- 
nut trees.”* Hence it is that in the French atlases of last 
century, and in the early Dutch maps, these islands are nearly 
always named the Cocos Islands; and this is the name that 
they bear in a general map of the Eastern Archipelago and 
adjoining seas which was published at Amsterdam in 1659 
(British Museum Press Mark KAR). I have been unable to 
find any allusion to these islands by their supposed dis- 
coverer, Captain William Keeling (1607-1610), in the 
accounts of this voyage given by Purchas, Prévost, and 
others. However, the evidence I have above given is sufli- 
cient to establish the fact that the cocoa-nut palm had 
established itself on this isolated group long before its occu- 
pation by man. Of this there is further proof. 
In a plan of these islands, attributed to Jan de Marre, 
the Dutch navigator, in 1729, which is contained in the 6th 
volume of Van Keulen’s Atlas, published at Amsterdam in 
1753, the principal islands are represented as covered with 
these palms, and the following quaint remark, extracted from 
page 19 of this volume, will serve to introduce the second 
point that I desire to prove. After referring to the circum- 
stance that these islands are low and wooded, possessing: no 
inhabitants, but having plenty of cocoa-nut palms, the writer 
observes that “it would seem that nature herself has pro- 
duced these trees.” This is an exceedingly interesting point, 
and I cannot rival the simple language of the Dutch author 
-In thus stating it. Before inquiring, however, into the 
capabilities of the stranded cocoa-nut for establishing itself 
on a coral island, it will be necessary to remark that the other 
vegetation of these islands which has been described or 
ireferred to by Van der Jagt, Keating, and Darwin, must have 
mostly occupied the interiors of the larger islands before the 
* Dalrymple’s Plans and Charts, No. 475. 
U 2 
