... and shows that he was a scientist ahead of his timeWe know that the genus Dracaena includes some forty species, almost all of them from the Old World, from Asia and Africa.
The Moa Dracaena is quite different. Clearly, we have here an as-yet undescribed Dracaena. That such an African relic should be found in a tiny part of western Cuba and nowhere else in the Antilles is one of those anomalies that defy all reasonable explanation.
Marie-Victorin understood that the presence of this
Dracaena was explained by continental drift, a daring theory advanced in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, and rejected as nonsense by Marie-Victorin's contemporaries:
The idea that the Cuban Dracaena is related to the giant Dracaena in the Canary Islands is an appealing hypothesis, a fact rather, explained by Wegenerian drift, an ancient continuity between Africa and the Americas, which left traces in the modern-day flora of the American tropics. The Cuban Dracaena will now stand as one of the clearest vestiges of this continuity.
