278 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 



in Florida, there are people on hand to plant them as they come ashore, 

 this means of extending- the distribution of the species may be very 

 effective. In fact, there seems to be but one instance on record where 

 living- cocoanuts are known to have floated to a remote island, and 

 even in this the possibility of shipwreck is b}^ no means excluded, 

 since oaken timbers were also cast up on the same island about the 

 same time. 



The philosopher Francis Leguat and his unfortunate companions, who were, in 

 the year 1690, the first inhabitants of the small island of Rodriguez, which lies 100 

 leagues to the eastward of the Isle of France, found no cocoa trees in it. But pre- 

 cisely at the period of their short residence there the sea threw upon the coast sev- 

 eral cocoanuts in a state of germination, as if it had been the intention of Providence 

 to induce them, by this useful and seasonable present, to remain on that island and 

 to cultivate it. 



Francis Leguat, who was unacquainted with the relations which seeds have to the 

 element in which they are designed to grow, was very much astonished to find that 

 those fruits, which weighed from 5 to 6 pounds, must have performed a journey of 60 

 or fourscore leagues without being Corrupted. He took it for granted — and he was 

 in the right — that they came from the island of St. Brande, which is situated to 

 the northeast of Rodriguez. Those two desert islands had not as yet, from the 

 creation of the world, communicated to each other all their vegetables, though situ- 

 ated in a current of the ocean which sets in alternately, in the course of one year, 

 for six months toward the one and six months toward the other. 



However this may be, they planted those cocoanuts, which, in the space of a year 

 and a half, sent out shoots of 4 feet in height. A blessing from Heaven so distinctly 

 marked had not the power of detaining them in that happy island. An inconsid- 

 erate desire of procuring for themselves women constrained them to abandon it, 

 notwithstanding the remonstrances of Leguat, and plunged them into a long series 

 of calamities, which few of them were able to survive. For my own part I can 

 entertain no doubt had they reposed that confidence in Providence which they had 

 reason to do its care would have conveyed wives for them to that desert island, as 

 it had sent to them the gift of the cocoanut. 1 



But, in spite of the quaintness of the language and the piety of the 

 argument, we must not overlook the fact that in the desert island, as in 

 Florida, there were men on hand who knew what to do % with the 

 cocoanuts, which had hitherto been unable to establish themselves. 



FAILURE OF MARITIME DISTRIBUTION IN AUSTRALIA. 



History and anthropology, and the distribution of seedless culti- 

 vated plants such as the sweet potato, taro, banana, and breadfruit, 

 testify to extensive and sustained human communications and migra- 

 tions throughout the islands of the Pacific and the Malay region, so 

 that no antecedent improbability attaches to a belief in the dissemina- 

 tion of the cocoanut by man. And yet those who have cherished the 

 theory of ocean winds and currents might still insist on the efficiency 

 of these means of dispersion were it not for the fact that the continent 



x St. Pierre's Botanical Harmony, p. 87. (Translated by Hunter, Worcester, 

 Mass., 1797.) 



