natural history.  The coco-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of its own seedling; the crab feloniously appropriates it and stores it up under his capacious tail for future personal use; the Malay steals it again from the thief for his own purposes; and ten to one the Dutch or English merchant beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum, and transmits it to Europe, where it serves to lighten our nights and assist at our matutinal tub, to point a moral and adorn the present tale.

If, however, our coco-nut is lucky enough to escape the robber-crabs, the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the hands of man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or sold from a costermonger’s barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after the fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head through the surrounding foliage to the sunlight above.  As a rule, the coco-nut has been dropped by its mother tree on the sandy soil of a sea-beach; and this is the spot it best loves, and where it grows to the stateliest height.  Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, and then the loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely till it is cast by the waves upon some distant coral reef or desert island.  It is this power of floating and surviving a long voyage that has dispersed the coco-nut so widely among oceanic islands, where so few plants are generally to be found.  Indeed, on many atolls or isolated reefs (for example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub that grows in any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry, the ducks, and the land crabs of the place entirely subsist.  In any case, wherever it happens to strike, the young coco-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big spreading leaves, not raised as afterwards on a tall stem, but springing direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and graceful fern.  In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young coco-nuts.  Their long feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive ideal tropics which, alas, are to be found in actual reality nowhere on earth save in the artificial palm-houses at Kew, and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing Monte Carlo.

For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered, and the soil around them opened; after which the tall graceful stem begins to rise rapidly into the open air.  In this condition it may be literally said to make the tropics—­those fallacious tropics, I mean, of painters and poets, of Enoch Arden and of Locksley Hall.  You may observe that whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a group of coco-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, ’You see there’s no