Shipwrecks might furnish a successful method
of launching viable coconuts, and such have no doubt sometimes
contributed to their distribution. But this assumption implies a
dissemination of the nuts by man, and if this principal fact is granted,
it is far more natural to believe in a conscious intelligent
dissemination.
The coconut is a cultivated tree. It may be met with in some spots
distant from human dwellings, but whenever such cases have been
subjected to a closer scrutiny, it appears that evidently, or at least
probably, huts had formerly existed in their neighborhood, but having
been destroyed by some accident, had left the palm trees uninjured. Even
in South America, where it may be found in forests at great distances
from the sea-shore, it is not at all certain that true native localities
occur, and it seems to be quite lost in its natural condition.
Granting the cultivated state of the palms as the only really important
one, and considering the impossibility or at least great improbability
of its dissemination by natural means, the distribution by man himself,
according to his wants, assumes the rank of an hypothesis fully adequate
to the explanation of all the facts concerning the life-history of the
tree.
We now have to inquire into the main question, [88] whether it is
probable that the coconut is of American or of Asiatic origin, leaving
aside the historic evidence which goes to prove that nothing is known
about the period in which its dissemination from one hemisphere to
another took place, we will now consider only the botanic and geographic
evidence, brought forward by Cook.
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