110 



THE COCO-NUT 



CHAP. 



place with many coco - nuts to find a considerable 

 difference in shape. The extremes are from spherical 

 to a form which is at least twice as long as it is thick. 

 The tip may be indented or beaked. These differences 

 are usually the characteristics of the tree, the nuts on 

 a single tree being alike. They could therefore easily 

 be maintained by selection and developed into race 

 characters. But there is obviously no object in this 

 so long as we do not know that any form is superior 

 to any other. 



There are practically to be distinguished in the 

 Philippines the following varieties : 



First : What may be called the San Ramon nut, 

 because it is the characteristic tree of the San Ramon 

 district, and because it has received especially careful 

 study there. This is a very large and productive 

 coco-nut. The average production, year after year, 

 from the San Ramon hacienda and the neighbouring 

 plantations, is one picul of copra from every 200 nuts ; 

 at this rate, 3270 nuts are needed to produce one ton, 

 or 2240 pounds of copra. Apparently the same nuts 

 are found near Dapitan, on the same island, where 

 they are known as " Romano." They are also in 

 general cultivation in the coast district of the province 

 of Pangasinan in Luzon, and are found occasionally 

 in various parts of the Philippines ; and individual 

 nuts, larger than any I have seen at San Ramon, have 

 been exhibited from the islands of Marinduque and 

 Bohol. This nut is found in various coco-nut countries, 

 ranging at least from Ceylon across Malaya and Poly- 

 nesia, and probably in the West Indies. But there 

 are no records from any other part of the world of 

 plantation averages showing such size of nut as those 

 of San Ramon. There was one cutting for the entire 

 plantation at San Ramon in 1905, when the average 

 production was one metric ton of copra from every 

 2800 nuts. This represents nuts more thau twice as 

 large as the average for the whole world. Under 

 reasonably favourable conditions the San Ramon nuts 



