SHORT NOTES. 
-Precocious Coco-nuts. 
Mr. A. B. Stephens sends the following note on an aberrant 
Coco-nut. 
It may interest some of the readers of your Botanical Notes 
to hear of the following freak of nature regarding a very young 
Coco-nut plant which I saw on my visit to the Yam Seng Estate, 
Perak. The nut was received amongst a great number of others 
on the 10th May 1897, and was laid out in the usua! way with 
them. This particular nut only sent out a few small crinkly 
leaves of about 15 inches in heizht, but they are apparently 
coming from two stems, and from one of them there are no less 
than five fruit fronds, four of which are barren, but the fifth has 
ten beautifully formed small coco-nuts on it. Unfortunately 
the plant was pulled up and removed to the overseer’s house on 
23rd November, and it has considerably dried up, but it has been 
put out again and has a green shoot on it, so that possibly 
further developments may yet be seen. It must surely be al- 
most a record for a nut to send out fruit fronds and actually bear 
nuts in six months and thirteen days. 
A. B. Stepheis. 
Certainly this is a most remarkable monstrosity, and I can 
find no record of anything of the kind, but about a year ago a 
Chinaman brought to the Gardens in Singapore as a great curio- 
sity a somewhat similar specimen. The nut was still attached 
to the plant, which bore the ordinary young leaves, from between 
which was protruded the portion of an inflorencence consisting 
of two short branches, the longest about six inches long, the 
other much shorter, which both bore the ordinary flowers. Na- 
_turally I thought at first it might be a hoax, such as the Chinese 
have long been famous for, but I carefully examined it and sa- 
tisfied myself that the flower spikes really were attached in the 
axils of the leaves. The owner was anxious to sell it at the 
