56 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ber of its seeds in each fruit to the lowest possible point consistent 

 with its continued existence at all, it still goes on retaining many- 

 signs of its ancient threefold arrangement. The ancestral and most 

 deeply ingrained habits persist in the earlier stages ; it is only in the 

 mature form that the later acquired habits begin fully to predominate. 

 Even so our own boys pass through an essentially savage childhood of 

 ogres and fairies, bows and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery 

 tales, as well as a romantic boyhood of mediaeval chivalry and advent- 

 ure, before they steady down into that crowning glory of our race, 

 the solid, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence 

 the cocoa-nut in its un stripped state is roughly triangular in form, its 

 angles answerimg to the separate three fruits of simpler palms ; and 

 it has three pits or weak places in the shell, through which the em- 

 bryos of the three original kernels used to force their way out. But as 

 only one of them is now needed, that one alone is left soft ; the other 

 two, which would be merely a source of weakness to the plant if un- 

 protected, are covered in the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless 

 they serve in part to deceive the too inquisitive monkey or other 

 enemy, who probably concludes that, if one of the pits is hard and 

 impermeable, the other two are so likewise. 



Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for the milk 

 in the cocoa-nut, and incidentally for some other matters in its econ- 

 omy as well, I am loath to leave the young seedling, whom I have 

 brought so far on his way, to the tender mercies of the winds and 

 storms and tropical animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his 

 juicy and delicate shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most 

 palms is a very pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind — the West 

 Indian mountain-cabbage — deserves a better and more justly descrip- 

 tive name, for it is really much more like seakale or asparagus. I 

 shall try to follow our young seedling on in life, therefore, so as to 

 give, while I am about it, a fairly comprehensive and complete biogra- 

 phy of a single flourishing cocoa-nut palm. 



Beginning, then, with the fall of the nut from the parent-tree, the 

 troubles of the future palm confront it at once in the shape of the nut- 

 eating crab. This evil-disposed crustacean is common around the 

 sea-coast of the Eastern tropical islands, which is also the region 

 mainly affected by the cocoa-nut palm ; for cocoa-nuts are essentially 

 shore-loving trees, and thrive best in the immediate neighborhood of 

 the sea. Among the fallen nuts, the clumsy-looking thief of a crab 

 (his appropriate Latin name is Birgus latro) makes great and dreaded 

 havoc. To assist him in his unlawful object he has developed a pair 

 of front legs, with specially strong and heavy claws, supplemented by 

 a last or tail-end pair armed only with very narrow and slender pincers. 

 He subsists entirely upon a cocoa-nut diet. Setting to vv^ork upon a 

 big fallen nut — with the husk on, cocoa-nuts measure in the raw state 

 about twelve inches the long way — he tears off all the coarse fiber bit 



