THE STRUCTURE OF THE ISLANDS 179 



Kapeting Balong but several other species of land-living crabs 

 have a habit of taking the fibre into their burrows, and so 

 deliberately burying it, and the influence of efforts at tilling 

 carried out by these large creatures, which exist on some of the 

 islands in great numbers, must be considerable. The land- 

 living Crustacea are then the earth-worms of the group, in as 

 far as their function in the formation of vegetable mould is con- 

 cerned ; and the earth-worm which does exist on the atoll is so 

 very uncommon that its share is negligible. 



The stem of a coco palm that has fallen lasts whole but 

 a very short time, the wood of the centre of the trunk is soft, 

 and soon by .the agencies of the myriad millepedes (native 

 name — haki ribu) and the natural processes of decay, the 

 trunk becomes hollowed out, and nothing but a shell of bark 

 is left. Every cyclone wind which visits the islands lays low 

 many hundreds of trees, and their rotting remains form 

 another source of soil, and another cloak for the coral debris. 



Besides the husk of the nut, the coco palm is perpetually 

 shedding fronds, for as it grows up and up the lowest fronds 

 drop off leaving those rings on the trunk which mark the 

 upward growth — and these fronds are always being added 

 to the land accumulations. The remainder of the vegetation 

 of the islands is characterised by a tropical mushroom rapidity 

 of growth ; the papias spring up fresh and green to a height 

 of twenty feet, and, like great weeds, die down and rot. There 

 is nothing more strange than the manner in which these 

 luxuriant trees appear after wet weather in a soil consisting of 

 nothing save coral chips and a little sand. At the end of a 

 dry period, the advent of a good spell of rain will produce 

 green shoots from every fissure of the surface of the ground, 

 and the most luxuriant of all the green things is the papia, or, 

 as it is called in the islands, the Katis. 



Even amongst the largest trees the Ampol (Pisonia grandis) 

 has been well called the "cabbage tree," for a branch the 

 thickness of a man's thigh is not to be trusted with a man's 

 weight : and no tree of any age is to be found that has not 

 ■some large portion rotted away Vegetation springs up rapidly 



