360 



Most of the specimens were very old nu(s; some, according to 

 their owners, had been preserved for scores of years as family 

 heirlooms. 



The first fonr "boetas" which I opened produced nothing, but in 

 the fifth I found a really beaufiful pearl still attached to the kernel; 

 the two next produced negative results again, and the eighth speci- 

 men I have kept unopened. 



The nut which had contained the pearl, as shown in Fig. 1, had 

 been purchased from an old native at Ritabel (Larat), one of the 

 Tauiniber Islands in the Moluccas, wlio informed me that it had 

 been gathered but a short time before. This proved to have been 

 the case, because the endosperm in it was quite normal, whereas 

 in the other nuts the kernel was either very much dried up or had 

 even partly become a mass of brown powder. 



The pearl was attached withoui the least trace of a stalk, being 

 merely embedded in the endosperm (Fig. 2), and was quite easy to 

 remove from the kernel. It lay exactly at the base of the nut, just 

 under the spot where the germinating pores ought to have been, 

 and thus agreed completely witii the indications as given above. 



This discovery, in my opinion, warrants the inference that the 

 cocos-pearl actually represents a calcified hanstorium, which has 

 been retained in the nut after the primary germination was checked, 

 owing to the plumule not being able to get through the shell on 

 account of the porus pervius being lacking. As tlie inner shell of 

 the ki'lapa boeta remains hermetically closed, the newly formed 

 haustoi'ium becomes encrusted under the influence of the cocoa-nut 

 milk with calcium-salts, although it still remains unexplained why 

 the cocos-pearl consists almost entirely of calcium carbonate, while 

 neither the cocos-kernel nor the cocoa-nut milk contains any calcium 

 carbonates. 



The belief that a kelnpa boeta invariably contains a cocos-pearl 

 was sufficiently disproved by my experience that of seven specimens 

 only one such formation was found in a "blind" cocoa-nut. On the 

 other band, it is probable, in my opinion, that it will be principally 

 (or exclusively?) the kelapn boeta that contains the cocos-pearl. 



The nature and origin of the cocos-pearl as a calcareous plant 

 germ might botanically be considered as analogous to a phe- 

 nomenon seen in human and animal pathology in the petrifaction 

 or mummification of the embryo, and termed Lithopaedion or 

 Lithoterion respectively. 



Amsterdam, March 1923. 



