294 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL. HERBARIUM. 



One of the coconuts brought back by Professor Pittier from Cocos 

 Island proved to be quite unlike the varieties grown in Costa Rica. 

 It was less than half the size of the mainland coconuts and was nearly 

 round, measuring 11 centimeters long by 11.5 centimeters wide. 

 The "eyes" were unusually large, the fertile foramen measuring 1.8 

 centimeters across. We can hardly hope to learn whether the single 

 cluster of small-fruited coconut palms found by Professor Pittier 

 represented the last survivors of the multitude found by Wafer. 

 Whether we take this view or assume that they were brought by some 

 unknown expedition or were drifted in from the sea and planted by 

 accident, as coconuts have been supposed to be, the fact remains that 

 no coconut palms survived in the parts of the island that Wafer 

 visited and described. 



The island suffered from a plague of rats at the time of Professor 

 Pittier's visit, and he suggests that these animals might have been 

 responsible for the disappearance of the coconut palms. It is true 

 that rats often do serious damage in plantations, making it necessary 

 to belt the palms with tin to keep the pests from climbing up. But 

 if the extinction of the palms is to be ascribed to the rats, they must 

 be considered as a very general factor, since they are distributed 

 over the whole tropical belt where coconuts are cultivated, from 

 Porto Rico to the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. They 

 would be as likely to interfere with the perpetuation of coconuts in 

 any abandoned place as on Cocos Island. 



Ethnologists may find in this hitherto unsuspected primitive occu- 

 pation of Cocos Island an additional evidence of the maritime skill 

 of the Indians of the Pacific coast of tropical America, and thus be 

 the more willing to consider the possibility of prehistoric communi- 

 cation between the shores of the American Continent and the Pacific 

 islands. The accounts which the Peruvians gave to the Spaniards 

 of lands in the Pacific led to the fitting out of the expeditions of 

 Mend ana, Sarmiento, and Quiros. The Polynesians also had tradi- 

 tions of places farther east than any existing islands. The natives 

 of the Marquesas Archipelago, the group that lies nearest to Cocos 

 Island and the Isthmus of Panama, told Captain Porter that the 

 coconut was brought from another island to the eastward. 



The cocoa-nut tree, as I before remarked, was said to have been brought from 

 Ootoopoo, an island which is supposed by the natives to be situated somewhere to 

 the windward of La Magdalena. 



None of our navigators have yet discovered an island of that name, so situated; 

 but in examining the chart of Tupia, that native of the island of Ulitea who left 

 there with Captain Cook on his first voyage, we find nearly in the place assigned by 

 the native of Nooaheevah to Ootoopoo an island called Ootoo.a 



a Porter, D., Journal of a Cruize made to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 2, p. 139. (Phila- 

 delphia, 1815.) 



