Some authors have taken the fibrous rind to be especially adapted to transport by sea, but if this were so, this would argue that water is the normal or at least the very frequent medium of dissemination, which of course it is not. We may, claim with quite as much right that the thick husk is necessary to enable the heavy fruit to drop from tall trees with safety. But even for this purpose the protection is not sufficient, as the nuts often suffer from falling to such a degree as to be badly injured as to their germinating qualities. It is well known that nuts, which are destined for propagation, are as a rule not allowed to fall off, but are taken from the trees with great care. Summing up his arguments, Cook concludes that there is little in the way of known facts to support the poetic theory of the coconut palm dropping its fruits into the sea to float away to barren islands and prepare them for [87] human habitation. 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.