THE MILK IN THE COCOA-NUT. 



55 



have no special protection for their seeds are obliged to produce a 

 great many of them at once, in order that one seed in a thousand may 

 finally survive the onslaughts of their Argus-eyed enemies ; but, when 

 they learn to protect themselves by hard coverings from birds and 

 beasts, they can dispense with some of these supernumerary seeds, 

 and put more nutriment into each one of those that they still retain. 

 Compare, for example, the innumerable small round seedlets of the 

 poppy-head with the solitary large and richly-stored seed of the wal- 

 nut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress with the single 

 compact and well-tilled seed of the filbert and the acorn. To the 

 very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if they meant to 

 produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and unprotected seeds, 

 like their original ancestors ; it is only at the last moment that they 

 recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules except one, and store 

 that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs at their disposal. 

 The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience that it is better to 

 be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in life with a good 

 capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor family of thirteen 

 needy and unprovided children. 



Now, the cocoa-nuts are descended from a great tribe — the palms 

 and lilies — which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity the 

 arrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. For 

 example, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there are 

 three green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-colored petals, three long 

 outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the cajisule, 

 and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms still 

 keep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them 

 which have specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have 

 lost in their later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and pos- 

 sess only one seed, often a very large one. There is no better and 

 more typical nut in the whole world than a cocoa-nut — that is to say, 

 from our present point of view at least, though the fear of that awful 

 person, the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not 

 quite technically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that 

 the cocoa-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delight- 

 ful information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which 

 he is so great a master, that it is really " a drupaceous fruit with a 

 fibrous mesocarp." Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice, hair- 

 splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will still 

 call a nut a nut, and that the cocoa-nut is the highest known de- 

 velopment of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most 

 richly stored seed of any known plant ; and this seed is surrounded 

 by one of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. 

 Hence the cocoa-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three 

 kernels which each nut used in its earlier and less developed days to 

 produce. But though the palm has thus taken to reducing the num- 



