Morphological Notes. 
BY 
Sir W. T. THISELTON-DYER, K.C.M.G., C.I.E., F.R.S., 
Late Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, /Lew. 
XII. Germination of the Double Coco-nut. 
With Plates XIX and XX, and a Figure in the Text. 
HE palm (Lodoicea sechellarum , Labill.) is remarkable in the vegetable 
JL kingdom for producing the largest seed of any known plant. Its 
native country was long unknown. But the seeds which were thrown up on 
the shores of the Indian Ocean, most frequently on the Maidive Islands, 
though occasionally on Ceylon and S. India, and as far as Zanzibar in one 
direction and Sumatra in the other, were held in great repute by the 
Eastern peoples for their supposed medicinal virtues. Though there is 
every reason to suppose that this repute was very ancient, it did not reach 
Europe till the sixteenth century. The general belief was that they were 
the produce of some marine plant, and this was accepted by even so 
capable a botanist as Rumphius as late as 1680. He says: ‘ non est 
fructus terrestris qui casu in mare procidit . . . sed fructus est in ipso 
crescens mari ’ (xii. 8). Although the seeds were capable of a wide oceanic 
dispersal which must have continued over a long period of time, I am 
aware of no case of their having spontaneously established themselves 
in any new territory. This is in striking contrast with the ordinary coco¬ 
nut, which, probably originally a native of S. America, is now widely 
distributed throughout the tropics. 
It was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that the mystery 
was cleared up. I take the account given by Sonnerat ( Voyage a la Nouvelle- 
Guine'e , pp. 3, 4): 4 Parmi les Isles de cet archipel [Sechelles], il y en a une 
que M. de la Bourdonnais designa sous le nom de XIsle des Palmes , lorsqu’il 
en fit la decouverte en 1743 ou 1744. Cette Isle, examinee de plus pres en 
1767, a ete nommee XIsle Praslin , nom que l’usage, qui prevaut en tout, a 
changd depuis en cela d 'Isle des Palmiers. C est sur cette Isle qu’on trouva 
le palmier qui produit ce fruit si recherche, qu’on n’avoit connu jusqu’alors 
que sous les noms de coco de Mer.. . .’ Sonnerat visited the island in t 771, 
and in his ‘ Voyage’ published in 1776 he gives five plates which represent the 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XXIV. No. XCIII. January, 1910.] 
