COCOA-NUT TREE. 
51 
or six years, the stem is seven or eight feet high, 
and the tree begins to bear. It continues to grow 
and bear fifty or sixty years, or perhaps longer, 
as there are many groves of trees, apparently in 
their highest perfection, which were planted by 
Pornare nearly forty years ago. While the plants 
are young, they require fencing, in order to protect 
them from the pigs; but after the crown has reached 
a few feet above the ground, the plants require no 
further care. 
The bread-fruit, the plantain, and almost every 
other tree furnishing any valuable fruit, arrives at 
perfection only in the most fertile soil; but the 
cocoa-nut, although it will grow in the rich 
bottoms of the valleys, and by the side of the 
streams that flow through them, yet flourishes 
equally on the barren sea-beach, amid fragments 
of coral and sand, where its roots are washed by 
every rising tide; and on the sun-burnt sides of 
the mountains, where the soil is shallow, and 
remote from the streams so favourable to vege¬ 
tation. 
The trunk of the tree is used for a variety of 
purposes : their best spears were made with cocoa- 
nut wood; wall plates, rafters, and pillars for 
their larger houses, were often of the same ma¬ 
terial ; their instruments for splitting bread-fruit, 
their rollers for their canoes, and also their most 
durable fences, were made with its trunk. It is 
also a valuable kind of fuel, and makes excellent 
charcoal. 
The timber is not the only valuable article the 
cocoa-nut tree furnishes. The leaves, called niau, 
are composed of strong stalks twelve or fifteen feet 
long. A number of long narrow pointed leaflets 
are ranged alternately on opposite sides. The 
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