22 FUNAFUTI ATOLL. 



No account of the botany of the Ellice Group appears to have 

 been published. In his recent works on Polynesian Botany, 

 Drake del Castello neglects to make any reference to this Archi- 

 pelago. A few plants were gathered by the Rev. S. J. Whitmee 

 during his missionary tours and presented to the Kew Herbarium. 

 From this collection Hemsley in the ' ' Challenger Reports Botany " 

 incidentally quotes Suriana inaritima, Linn., and JRhizophora 

 mucronata, Lamarck, from Funafuti itself, and from the Ellice 

 in general the following : Ochrosia parviflora, Henslow, Tourne- 

 fortia argentea, Linn, f., Acalypha grandis, Bentham, Pipturus 

 argenteus, Weld, Guettarda speciosa, Linn., Premna taitensis, 

 Schauer, Nephrolepis exaltata, Schott, and Octoblepharum smarag- 

 dinum, Mitten. 



The vegetable monarch of the atoll world is the coconut palm 

 (Cocos nucifera, Linn.), tall individuals of which, rearing their 

 plumes to a height of over eighty feet, give to the mariner his first 

 landfall. Every available rod of dry land is planted with coco- 

 nuts, one tiny islet, a mere shingle bank, so swept with spray 

 that lichens are the only other vegetable life, yet grows three poor 

 stunted and battered palms. It is to be emphasised that all 

 coconuts are planted ; the idea of a wild palm being as strange 

 in Funafuti as that of a wild peach might be in England. Gill in 

 describing the primeval forest of the uninhabited island of Nassau 

 in 1862, alludes to but a single coconut tree among the indigenous 

 vegetation.* I doubt whether, despite popular opinion to the 

 contrary, a wild coconut palm is to be found throughout the 

 breadth of the Pacific. Certainly it is most rare, again contrary 

 to popular theory, for a drifted coconut thrown upon the beach 

 by winds and waves to produce a tree.f So intimately is this 

 palm now associated with native life that it is difficult to imagine 

 an atoll before its introduction. 



* Gill Jottings from the Pacific, 1885, p. 30. 



f From eye-witnesses I have heard of several wild coconut palms on 

 Facing Island, Queensland, and again of one at Emu Park, Queensland. 

 But, if the popular idea were correct, the Queensland beaches should 

 have presented many hundred miles of coconut groves to their earliest 

 explorers, receiving, as I can testify they do, abundance of drifted nuts 

 and fulfilling every requirement of soil and climate. As Jukes says : 

 " The entire absence of these trees from every part of Australia is a most 

 striking fact, since it is I believe the only country in the world so much 

 of which lies within the tropics in which they have never been found." 

 (Voy. " Fly," i., 1847, p. 132.) I have been told by Queensland Aborigines 

 that they always tore up and ate any sprouting nuts they might find, 

 but even this scarcely accounts for the remarkable absence of the 

 coconut palm from Queensland. Guppy's remarks on the germination 

 of stranded coconuts (Nature, xli., p. 492) will repay perusal, also 

 Dana's in Corals and Coral Islands, 1872, p. 181. Where the original 

 home of this palm was, has been discussed at length by Seemann in 

 the Flora Vitiensis, and by De Candolle Origin of Cultivated Plants, 

 1884, p. 429. 



