THE COCO-NUT PALM {COCOS NUCIFERA, LINN.). 325 



face ") ; and this name coco (plural cocoes) caught on and was adopted 

 generally by English and other European writers. Next, when Dr. 

 Johnson's dictionary was being printed, by mistake the article on what 

 Johnson himself elsewhere habitually wrote of as. " coco " or " cocoes " 

 {i.e. the old " Indian nut ") was, evidently by some careless editor, 

 run together with the article on that very different tropical product 

 which, by an adaptation of its native Mexican name cacaoatl, was 

 called " cocoa " (or more properly " cacao "). From that time till 

 quite recently the form " cocoa-nut " has been used almost universally 

 even by educated people ; but I confess I was rather troubled in mind 

 when I found I was advertised to speak to you to-day of cocoa-nuts 

 instead of coco-nuts. 



It may be added that it was apparently in order to avoid confusion 

 between the two similarly-named commercial products that the palm- 

 fruit was long known in London commercial circles, and conse- 

 quently at country fairs, as " koker-nuts " or simply " kokers." 



An old friend of mine, towards the end of a long life, most of which 

 was spent in the tropics, used to complain of the long straight rows of 

 coco-nut trees which, with the huge rectangular blocks of sugar-canes, 

 made most of the scenery in a land where, whether the air was dry 

 or saturated with moisture, it was always hot ; he said that the palms 

 reminded him of worn-out stable mops standing on end. 



The coco-nut — like most other palms — is essentially of very simple 

 form, almost as simple as the toy tree of a Noah's ark. It consists, 

 normally, of an unbranched stem, rather shapeless and even gouty- 

 looking, from the top of which spring the comparatively few but 

 large leaves and the comparatively small spikes which carry the 

 flowers and fruit. The youngest post-impressionist artist should 

 have no difficulty in setting down on paper something recognizable 

 as such a typical palm. As a matter of fact, the draughtsmen who 

 accompanied the earlier travellers through lands where the coco-nut 

 flourished generally contented themselves with indicating the palms 

 which they saw in this simple sort of way, as may be seen in the 

 drawings of Captain Samuel Wallis, who, with Captain Cook, was 

 one of the earliest, at the end of the eighteenth century, to investigate 

 the Pacific islands ; and the drawings which, about fifty years later, 

 Captain Beechey, of H.M.S. Blossom, brought back are hardly better 

 in their representation of the distinctive character of the coco-nut 

 palm. 



It took much closer observation than these earlier travellers could 

 give to detect the details of form and arrangement of parts sufficiently 

 to enable an artist to set down on paper lines which suggest 

 anything like the real aspect of a palm, and how the general aspect of 

 one palm differs from that of another. As a matter of fact the minute 

 differences are innumerable, and often very difficult to detect even 

 by the man with the most experienced eye ; yet it is perhaps possible 

 briefly to indicate enough of these to make plain — at any rate with 

 the help of pictures — what a coco-nut palm is like, and wherein 



