The Philippine Journal of Science, C. Botany. 
Vol. XII, No. 1, January, 1917. 
THE ORIGIN AND DISPERSAL OF COCOS NUCIFERA 
By 0. Beccari 
{Florence, Italy) 
Having had the opportunity of meeting Mr, J, F. Rock 
shortly after his trip to the Palmyra Islands I became much 
interested in his account of the exceptional conditions which 
he found in the flora of this small and isolated group. This 
flora proves, at least as far as the phanerogams are concerned, 
to be composed of an extraordinarily small number of species, 
belonging to the common strand flora of the Malay Archipelago 
and Polynesia, and of the coconut palm, which composes nearly 
the whole of the forests that cover these islands. 
The Palmyra Islands belong to the categoiy of those un- 
inhabited coral islands, covered with dense groves of coconut 
palms, and of which Simmonds writes, as reported by O. F, 
Cook,^ “the ungathered nuts which have fallen year after year, 
lie upon the ground in incredible quantities.” 
The special circumstances in which the Palmyra Islands are 
placed; their coral origin; their isolation, consequent to the 
great distance from any other land; the complete absence of 
indigenous inhabitants ; the want of drinking water ; the absence 
of any traces of economic plants that might suggest that they 
had ever been inhabited; and the certainty that they are but 
seldom visited, either by fishermen or by any person who has 
tried to turn their wealth (which consists of the coconut solely) 
into a source of profit — all these give me the occasion, in addition 
to describing the peculiar characteristics of the coconut produced 
in these islands, ^ to offer certain considerations of an evolu- 
tionary and geographic nature, opposed to those which Mr. O. F. 
Cook has advanced with much competence and erudition in his 
two memoirs on the coconut palm.® Cook, in effect, sustains 
^History of the coconut palm in America, Contr. U. S. Nat. Herb. 14 
(1910) 298. 
“ Cocos nucifera Linn, forma palmyrensis Becc. in Rock, J. F., Palmyra 
Island with a description of its flora, College of Hawaii Bull. 4 (1916) 1-53, 
t. 1-20. 
^ The origin and distribution of the cocoa palm, Contr. U. S. Nat. Herb. 
7 (1901) 257-293; and History of the coconut palm in America, ibid. 14 
(1910) 271-342. The first of these memoirs will be denoted by “I” in 
this article; the second, by “II.” 
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