186 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 



before they steady down into that crowning glory of our 

 race, the solid, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British 

 Philistine. Hence the coco-nut in its unstripped state is 

 roughly triangular in form, its angles answering 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 unprotected, 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 like- 

 wise. 



Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted 

 for the milk in the coco-nut, and incidentally for some 

 other matters in its economy as well, I am loth 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 descriptive 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 biography of a single 

 flourishing coco-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 



