284 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 



tops of the cocoanut are not only unprotected, but are apparently rel- 

 ished by cattle, against which nurseries and young plantations must 

 be fenced 



The presence of tne cocoa palm only about actual human habitations 

 and its complete absence from the forests of Guatemala is brought 

 forward by Stoll : as a reason for denying the existence of the species 

 among the Indians b} r whom many of the now wooded areas were 

 formerly thickly populated. It is evident, however, from what has 

 already been said that such an inference is quite unwarranted. What- 

 ever might be the possibilities of the cocoanut if cast up on a newly 

 emerged volcanic or coral island, it rnay be accepted as certain that it 

 can not withstand unassisted the competition of an ordinary tropical 

 flora of vines, shrubs, and trees. Such arguments as that of Stoll 

 prove, in fact, too much; for few things can be more certain than that 

 many settlements have been made and abandoned in the coast districts 

 of Guatemala within the last four centuries, and the complete disap- 

 pearance of the cocoanuts, if a fact, furnishes emphatic testimon}" to 

 the dependence of the species upon man, but gives us no inkling con- 

 cerning its presence or absence among the pre-Columbian Indians of 

 this or any other region. 



THE ORIGINAL HABITAT OF THE COCOA PALM. 



But if the littoral distribution of the cocoanut is the result of human 

 effort, where did the natural development of the species take place? 

 The literature of tropical agriculture abounds in statements to the 

 effect that the cocoanut is strictly a shore plant, and the botanist 

 Spruce, one of the ablest students of palms, held this opinion and 

 believed in a Pacific origin. 



The cultivation of the cocoanut is limited to the regions bordering the Atlantic 

 and Pacific oceans. As we ascend the Amazon it gradually becomes sterile. At 

 Manaos, 800 miles up, the fruits appear fully formed externally, but are invariably 

 empty. At San Carlos del Rio Negro, almost exactly midway between the two 

 oceans, there were, in 1854, two well-grown cocoa palms which had never even 

 flowered. 2 



Nevertheless, it is now well known that many plants which were 

 formerly supposed to belong strictly to the strand vegetation of 

 oceanic coasts are also to be found in elevated regions. Thus Schimper 

 has shown that in Java many strand species reappear on the volcanic 

 mountains of that island, thoup-h absent from the intervening- forest 

 belt. Though this possibility seems never to have been considered, 

 there is nothing violently improbable in the idea that the original 

 home of the cocoanut was in some of the sheltered vallevs of the equa- 

 torial Andes where elevation moderated and equalized the temperature, 



'Guatemala, p. 117, (Leipzig, 1886). 



2 Journ. Linn. Soc. London, vol. 11. p. 80 (1871). 



