THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 185 



fruit. Many palms still keep pretty well to this primitive 

 arrangement, but a few of them which have specially pro- 

 tected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in their 

 later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess 

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

 and more typical nut in the whole world than a coco-nut 

 that is to say, from our present point of view at least, 

 though the fear of that awful person, the botanical Smel- 

 fungus, compels me to add that this is not quite technically 

 true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the 

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

 delightful 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 coco-nut is the highest known develop- 

 ment 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 unmanage- 

 able of any known shells. Hence the coco-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 

 number 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 ar- 

 rangement. 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 pre- 

 dominate. Even so our own boys pass through an es- 

 sentially 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 adventure, 



