of a fibrous coat, which afterwards becomes the hair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; while inside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself.  The office of the coco-nut water is the deposition of the nutty part around the side of the shell; it is, so to speak, the mother liquid, from which the harder eatable portion is afterwards derived.  This state is not uncommon in embryo seeds.  In a very young pea, for example, the inside is quite watery, and only the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observed when green peas first come into season.  But the special peculiarity of the coco-nut consists in the fact that this liquid condition of the interior continues even after the nut is ripe, and that is the really curious point about the milk in the coco-nut which does actually need accounting for.

In order to understand it one ought to examine a coco-nut in the act of budding, and to do this it is by no means necessary to visit the West Indies or the Pacific Islands; all you need to do is to ask a Covent Garden fruit salesman to get you a few ‘growers.’  On the voyage to England, a certain number of precocious coco-nuts, stimulated by the congenial warmth and damp of most shipholds, usually begin to sprout before their time; and these waste nuts are sold by the dealers at a low rate to East-end children and inquiring botanists.  An examination of a ‘grower’ very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in the coco-nut.

It must be duly borne in mind, to begin with, that the prime end and object of the nut is not to be eaten raw by the ingenious monkey, or to be converted by lordly man into coco-nut biscuits, or coco-nut pudding, but simply and solely to reproduce the coco-nut palm in sufficient numbers to future generations.  For this purpose the nut has slowly acquired by natural selection a number of protective defences against its numerous enemies, which serve to guard it admirably in the native state from almost all possible animal depredators.  First of all, the actual nut or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed just inside the softest of the three pores or pits at the end of the shell, and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious pulp, destined to feed and support it during its earliest unprotected days, if not otherwise diverted by man or monkey.  But as whatever feeds a young plant will also feed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palm for the use of its own seedling, the coco-nut has been compelled to inclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid and defensive shell.  And, once more, since the palm grows at a very great height from the ground—­I have seen them up to ninety feet in favourable circumstances—­this shell stands a very good chance of getting broken in tumbling to the earth, so that it has been necessary to surround it with a mass of soft and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, and acts as a buffer to it when it comes in contact with the soil beneath.  So many protections has the coco-nut gradually devised for itself by the continuous survival of the best adapted amid numberless and endless spontaneous variations of all its kind in past time.