THE PALMS OF BRITISH INDIA AND CEYLON. 445 



fungoid attaclv being the canse of the failure of the plant to pro- 

 duce more than one leaf. I saw here the same thing happened in a 

 friend's jaxdi where he planted a germinating nut on the very spot 

 where he had insufficiently removed a huge stump of a jack tree. 

 The plant died after the first leaf and after subsequently^ planting 

 a second nut, the same thing happened. He then dug a very 

 large hole, removing all dead organic material and putting lime 

 and good friable soil. He succeeded the third time and the Coco- 

 de-mer is now producing its third leaf. I know little of Bombay 

 soil and rainfall, but I noticed that many parts of the town are 

 water-logged. If you can, avoid clayey soil for Coco-de-mer, but 

 here we succeed in stiff laterite where particles of quartz reach a 

 large percentage. Have you got any other soil than the clayey 

 soil I came across at the Victoria Gardens ? Perhaps not, and this 

 will handicap, with a heavy rainfall, the growth of some of the 

 palm trees. There is no reason why you should not prepare an 

 artificial soil with coarse sand and small stones and allow the tree 

 to make its proper growth during the first three or four j^ears, when 

 it will become very hardy. Here it grows in any stiff soil on 

 mountain slopes." 



In a postscript M. Dupont adds an important suggestion : 

 " Avoid putting the nuts deep and flat on the ground, but plant 

 superficially in a slanting or even vertical position to avoid the young 

 stem getting bruised against the nut in sprouting." 



Mr. G. T. Lane, the Curator of the Sibpur Botanic Garden, in a 

 letter, dated 26th Februarj^ 1913, to Dr. Gage, refers to this danger 

 thus : — " I remember also that one or more of these seedlings were 

 strangled through the radicle turning round and trying to push its 

 way through between the lobes of the nut, and thus preventing the 

 plumule from developing. This seems to be the only difficulty 

 about germinating these nuts ; if the point of the long radicle be 

 injured, it dies." 



Farmer wrote to Thiselton-Dyer : — " It may interest you to know 

 that in 1890, when I was at Peradeniya, there was a young plant 

 (of Lodoicea) growing in the Gardens which Trimen told me had 

 been planted about five years previously. The ' nut ' was still in 

 the ground and connected by the sucker with the plant. The latter 

 bore, I think, about five leaves ; the later formed ones were very 

 large, somewhat resembling those of Gorypha umhramdifera.'"^ 



Wald mentions a specimen growing in the Botanic Gardens of 

 Buitenzorg, which in its thirtieth year had not yet begun to form a 

 stem." 



H. W. Cave has an interesting note in his " Book of Cejdon" : — 

 "I first secured a photograph," he says, "of this specimen (a 



1 Thiselton-Dyer, 1. c. p. 230. - Wald, 1. c. p. G2. 



