2 7o Friiits and Fruit- Trees. 



The Coco-nut palm attains the height of sixty to a 

 hundred feet ; the pinnate leaves are about twenty feet in 

 length, and sixteen to twenty in number. The flowering 

 branches are five or six feet long, enclosed while young 

 in a great sheath or " spathe." A bunch of nuts is pro- 

 duced every month, so that ten or twelve are generally to 

 be seen upon the tree at once, every bunch consisting of 

 eight or nine up to twenty. The production commences 

 when the tree is about eight years old, and continues 

 for seventy or eighty years. In its perfect state the fruit 

 is a brown three-cornered lump, larger than a man's head, 

 about half of it consisting of fibrous husk, in the heart of 

 which, nearer to the lower extremity, is lodged the nut. 

 In the rudimentary state the ovary is three-celled. A 

 memorandum of this is preserved in the corresponding 

 number of scar-like depressions at the extremity of the 

 shell ; one of them soft, and allowing of penetration with 

 the knife, so that we can draw off the milk without crack- 

 ing the shell; the other two hard and impervious. That 

 such is the real history becomes quite plain on comparing 

 the coco-nut with its near ally, the coquilla-nut (the fruit 

 of the Attalea funifera), this being either three-celled, or 

 two-celled, or only one-celled. In estimating the so- 

 called "uses" of natural productions, we should always 

 remember that the true idea of use is threefold. First 

 there is the animal use, in which the brutes go shares 

 with ourselves. Then the charming usefulness realized 

 only by the heart and the intellect, the use of beauty. 

 Lastly, there is the supreme usefulness subserved, as 



