THE MILK IN THE COCOA-NUT. 57 



by bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he hammers 

 away with his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole till he has pounded 

 an opening right through it. This done he twists round his body so 

 as to turn his back upon the cocoa-nut he is operating upon (crabs are 

 never famous either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds 

 awkwardly but effectually to extract all the white kernel or pulp 

 through the breach with his narrow pair of hind pincers. Like man, 

 too, the robber-crab knows the value of the outer husk as well as of 

 the eatable nut itself, for he collects the fiber in surprising quantities 

 to line his burrow and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxuri- 

 ous couch. Alas, however, for the helplessness of crabs and the ra- 

 pacity and cunning of all-appropriating man ! The spoil-sport Malay 

 digs up the nest for the sake of the fiber it contains, which spares him 

 the trouble of picking junk on his OM'n account, and then he eats the 

 industrious crab who has laid it all up, while he melts down the great 

 lump of fat under the robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets from 

 it as much as a good quart of what may be practically considered as 

 limpid cocoa-nut oil. Sic vos non vohis is certainly the melancholy 

 refrain of all natural history. The cocoa-nut palm intends the oil for 

 the nourishment of its own seedling ; the crab feloniously appropriates 

 it and stores it up under his capacious tail for future personal use ; 

 the Malay steals it again from the thief for his own purposes ; and 

 ten to one the Dutch or English merchant beguiles it from him with 

 sized calico or poisoned rum, and transmits it to Europe, where it 

 serves to lighten our nights and assist at our matutinal tub, to point 

 a moral and adorn the present tale. 



If, however, our cocoa-nut is lucky enough to escape the robber- 

 crabs, the i^igs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the 

 hands of man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or 

 sold from a costermonger's barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial 

 London at a penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinat- 

 ing after the fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head 

 through the surrounding foliage to the sunlight above. As a rule, the 

 cocoa-nut has been dropped by its mother-tree on the sandy soil of a 

 sea-beach ; and this is the spot it best loves, and where it grows to 

 the stateliest height. Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, 

 and then the loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely till 

 it is cast by the waves upon some distant coral reef or desert island. 

 It is this power of floating and surviving a long voyage that has dis- 

 persed the cocoa-nut so widely among oceanic islands, where so few 

 plants are generally to be found. Indeed, on many atolls or isolated 

 reefs (for example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub that 

 grows in any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry, the ducks, and 

 the land-crabs of the i:»lace entirely subsist. In any case, wherever it 

 happens to strike, the young cocoa-nut sends up at first a fine rosette 

 of big, spreading leaves, not raised as afterward on a tall stem, but 



