The arguments in favour of an Asiatic, or contrary to an American origin, are the following:—
1. A current between the third and fifth parallels, north latitude, flows from the islands of the Indian Archipelago to Panama.[2169] To the north and south of this are currents which take the opposite direction, but they start from regions too cold for the cocoa-nut, and do not touch Central America, where it is supposed to have been long indigenous.
2. The inhabitants of the islands of Asia were far bolder navigators than the American Indians. It is very possible that canoes from the Asiatic Islands, containing a provision of cocoa-nuts, were thrown by tempests or false manœuvres on to the islands or the west coast of America. The converse is highly improbable.
3. The area for three centuries has been much vaster in Asia than in America, and the difference was yet more considerable before that epoch, for we know that the cocoa-nut has not long existed in the east of tropical America.
4. The inhabitants of the islands of Asia possess an immense number of varieties of this tree, which points to a very ancient cultivation. Blume, in his Rumphia, enumerates eighteen varieties in Java and the adjacent islands, and thirty-nine in the Philippines. Nothing similar has been observed in America.
5. The uses of the cocoa-nut are more varied and more habitual in Asia. The natives of America hardly utilize it except for the contents of the nut, from which they do not extract the oil.
6. The common names, very numerous and original in Asia, as we shall presently see, are rare, and often of European origin in America.
7. It is not probable that the ancient Mexicans and inhabitants of Central America would have neglected to spread the cocoa-nut in several directions, had it existed among them from a very remote epoch. The trifling breadth of the Isthmus of Panama would have facilitated the transport from one coast to the other, and the species would soon have been established in the West Indies, at Guiana, etc., as it has become naturalized in Jamaica, Antigua,[2170] and elsewhere, since the discovery of America.
8. If the cocoa-nut in America dated from a geological epoch more ancient than the pleiocene or even eocene deposits in Europe, it would probably have been found on both coasts, and the islands to the east and west equally.
9. We cannot find any ancient date of the existence of the cocoa-nut in America, but its presence in Asia three or four thousand years ago is proved by several Sanskrit names. Piddington in his index only quotes one, narikela. It is the most certain, since it recurs in modern Indian languages. Scholars count ten of these, which, according to their meaning, seem to apply to the species or its fruit.[2171] Narikela has passed with modifications into Arabic and Persian.[2172] It is even found at Otahiti in the form ari or haari,[2173] together with a Malay name.