72 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXII. 



may be rasped with a file, but is with difficulty cut with a knife.' 

 I can onlj?^ conjecture that this must have been described from an 

 old and desiccated nut. A fresh one which afforded Dr. Walter 

 Gardiner material for a study of the histologj^ of the endosperm must 

 have been immature, for sections were easily cut with a razor, and 

 the consistence was not much harder than that of a turnip. 



Apparently in an earlier stage of development, the endosperm is 

 unconsolidated and gelatinous. Sir William Hooker says : 'Before 

 the fruit has attained its perfect maturity, the interior .... contains 

 a substance like a white jelly, firm, transparent, and sweet to the 

 taste. A single Ooco-nut holds, perhaps, three pints of this 

 substance ; bxit if kept a few days, it turns sour, thick and un- 

 palatable, giving out a very disagreeable smell.' Miss North gives 

 a more graphic description : ' The outer shell was green and heart- 

 shaped ; only the inner shell was double, and full of white jelly, 

 enough to fill the largest soup tureen." And elsewhere, as quoted 

 by Sir Henry Yule : ' I ate some of the jelly from inside .... of the 

 purest white and not bad.'^ The late General Gordon, who, as is 

 well-known, was deeply interested in the palm, on somewhat 

 mystical grounds, informed me in a note : ' The nut when ripe is 

 black and falls from the tree ; the gelatinous jelly is then hard 

 like ivory.' It would be extremely interesting to trace the his- 

 tological changes which accompany that of the texture .... 

 According to the Genera Plantarum Lodoicea has the ' embryo 

 basilains, sinum spectans.' But unless I am mistaken the sinus is 

 the apex of the nut, and the embryo is therefore apical. In any 

 case the sinus being open affords the embryo a free path for emer- 

 gence." 



Germination : — According to William Hooker, a year elapses 

 from the period of its falling from the tree before the nut begins to 

 germinate. Button, hoM^ever, says, that it germinates four or five 

 months after falling from the tree, and sometimes even before. 

 Thiselton-Dyer gives the following description: "The germina 

 tion morphologically is of an ordinary monocotyledonous type. The 

 apex of the cotyledon remains immersed in the endosperm and 

 develops into a vast suctorial organ, while its petiole, which is about 

 an inch in diameter, emerges from the nut carrying with it the 

 plumule and ' radicle' ". According to Button, the petiole " enters 

 the ground to the depth of about one or two feet, then continues 

 underground nearly parallel to the surface for a distance of four, 

 five, six feet, sometimes more." " A note of General Gordon's is 

 that it 'comes to sprout out of the ground twelve feet from nut.' 

 Mr. Button subsequently informed me that it ' runs in the ground, 



1 Eiecollections of a happy life, II, 289. 

 - Hobson-Jobson, 178. 



