COOK — THE COCONUT PALM IN AMEKICA, 315 



extensively cultivated in Porto Rico under the native name yautia, 

 are still commonly called cocos in Jamaica. 



Peter Martyr used the word coccos in his ninth Decade in describ- 

 ing coconuts in the East Indies (Coccos appellant fructus illos . . .), 

 but no modern writer seems to have recorded the word as a native 

 East Indian name of the coconut. None of the numerous names 

 given in Watt's Dictionary of the Economic Products of India and 

 in Wallace's vocabularies of thirty-three languages of the Malay 

 Archipelago has any apparent resemblance to coco, unless it be copra, 

 the East Indian name of the dried meat. 



Some authorities note an ancient Egyptian word as the original 

 of the Greek Icouki of Theophrastus and the Latin cuci of Pliny. 

 Seemann denies that the Egyptian Icouki referred to the coconut, 

 but applies it to a native African fan palm, Borassus. It is also 

 possible to identify the cuciophoron of Theophrastus with the doum 

 palm of Upper Egypt (Hyphaene). a Indeed, the word u lcouk" is 

 still to be heard in the bazaars of Cairo as the name of the horny 

 endosperm of the doum palm, commonly used for making the beads 

 of rosaries, and other small objects. 



Some etymologists would assimilate Icouki with Icoklcos, a general 

 Greek word for fruit, berry, or seed, the same as the Latin coccus. 

 The word coccus seems to have come into Latin as the name of the 

 Kermes insect (Coccus ilicis) that yielded the scarlet dye, rather than 

 as the name of a seed or a berry. Nevertheless, we find among later 

 post-Columbian writers of botanical Latin, such as Piso, the expres- 

 sion Coccus Indica taking the place of Nux Indica as the name of the 

 true coconut and Coccus Medica or Coccus Maldivica, instead of Nux 

 Medica or Nux Maldivensium. Eden's English translation of Oviedo 

 shows the word cocus; Oviedo himself adhered consistently to coco, 

 except as he wrote cocos in the plural number, as in the heading of 

 his chapter. Linnaeus, in his older works, such as the Hortus Clif- 

 fortianus and the Flora Zeylanica, also used the generic name Coccus. 

 The change to Cocos seems to have been made in the first edition of 

 the Species Plant arum (1753) without any previous author being 

 indicated as having used the name in this form. The fourth edition 

 of Genera Plantarum (1752) uses the old spelling Coccus, but the 

 fifth edition (1754) adopts the new form Cocos. 



The Latin and Greek derivations that have been invented for the 

 word may have quite as little basis in fact as the fanciful theory given 

 by Oviedo, and repeated by many later writers, that the name was 

 suggested by the resemblance of the base of the shell to the face of a 

 monkey. The Spanish language has a verb cocar, meaning to make 

 faces like a monkey, and even a noun coco, meaning ogre or bugbear, 



a Greene, Edw. L., Landmarks of botanical history, pt. 1, Smiths. Misc. Coll., 

 vol. 54, p. 132. (1909.) 



