COOK THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 319 



had more recent contacts with the Malayan and Melanesian races. 

 This eastward movement into the Pacific explains the presence, even 

 in the most eastern archipelagoes, of many seedless varieties of the 

 breadfruit, banana, and other Malayan plants, and of an infusion of 

 Papuan or Melanesian blood. Yet these later influences have not 

 destroyed the essential likeness of the Polynesian and Malayan 

 culture to that of ancient America. The general unity of the Malayo- 

 Polynesian language and the similarity of the people and their cus- 

 toms to those of the American Indians are more obvious in the 

 remote islands, such as New Zealand, Easter Island, and Hawaii, than 

 in the equatorial archipelagoes, where the Melanesian influences are 

 more apparent. The Polynesians have traditions and genealogies 

 that refer to the introduction of the breadfruit as having taken place 

 about eightv generations or two thousand years a^o, but this eastward 

 migration that carried the breadfruit need not have had any con- 

 nection with the westward migration which carried the coconut into 

 the Pacific from America, and which probably took place at a much 

 more ancient period. 



Nor is it necessary to believe that contacts of the islanders with 

 America entirely ceased during the modern period of eastward migra- 

 tion. The presence of the banana in pre-Spanish America forbids 

 such an assumption. In addition to numerous traditions of the 

 arrival of people from the seas, in Peru and elsewhere, there was the 

 definitely reported historical incident of the black, frizzle-haired 

 people of the Isthmus of Panama, which can hardly be explained 

 except by supposing that a tribe of Polynesians had established 

 themselves on the Isthmus when Balboa crossed it and discovered 

 the Pacific Ocean. 



The origin of the coconut in America and its dissemination by 

 human agency to the tropics of the Old World do not stand alone as 

 botanical theories, but are in full accord with more recent and well- 

 established discoveries in the fields of ethnology and archaeology. 

 It is now generally admitted by ethnologists that the ancient civiliza- 

 tions of tropical America were of native, indigenous origin and not 

 imported from abroad. In Egypt and Assyria, on the contrary, it 

 does not appear that the earliest civilizations were indigenous. 

 Recent discoveries make it possible to trace them back to the shores 

 of the Persian Gulf and to southern Arabia, and to a seafaring exotic 

 race, skilled in agriculture and navigation. 



That the primitive agricultural people who distributed the coconut 

 and other American plants over the islands and shores of the Pacific 

 and Indian oceans came originally from America is a possibility that 

 appears worthy of careful consideration by students of botany and 

 ethnology. The tropical contact of the two hemispheres was so 

 remote in time, and the subsequent changes have been so great on 



