Windows of Love

against the hop-fly, the turnip-fly, and the phylloxera. The smaller andthe more insignificant our enemy, viewed individually, the moredifficult is he to cope with in the mass. All the elephants in the worldcould have been hunted down and annihilated, in all probability, withfar less labour than has been expended upon one single little all butmicroscopic parasite in France alone. The enormous rapidity ofreproduction in the family of aphides is the true cause of ourhelplessness before them. It has been calculated that a single aphis mayduring its own lifetime become the progenitor of 5,904,900,000descendants. Each imperfect female produces about ninety young ones,and lives long enough to see its children’s children to the fifthgeneration. Now, ninety multiplied by ninety four times over gives thenumber above stated. Of course, this makes no allowance for casualtieswhich must be pretty frequent: but even so, the sum-total of aphidesproduced within a small garden in a single summer must be something veryextraordinary.

It is curious, too, that aphides on the whole seem to escape the noticeof insect-eating birds very tolerably. I cannot, in fact, discover thatbirds ever eat them, their chief real enemy being the little lizard-likelarva of the lady-bird, which devours them everywhere greedily inimmense numbers. Indeed, aphides form almost the sole food of the entirelady-bird tribe in their earlier stages of existence; and there is nobetter way of getting rid of blight on roses and other garden plantsthan to bring in a good boxful of these active and voracious littlegrubs from the fields and hedges. They will pounce upon the aphidesforthwith as a cat pounces upon the mice in a well-stocked barn orfarmyard. The two-spotted lady-bird in particular is the determinedexterminator of the destructive hop-fly, and is much beloved accordinglyby Kentish farmers. No doubt, one reason why birds do not readily seethe aphis of the rose and most other species is because of theirprevailing green tint, and the close way in which they stick to theleaves or shoots on whose juices they are preying. But in the case ofmany black and violet species, this protection of imitative colour iswanting, and yet the birds do not seem to care for the very conspicuouslittle insects on the broad bean, for example, whose dusky hue makesthem quite noticeable in large masses. Here there may very likely besome special protection of nauseous taste in the aphides themselves (Iwill confess that I have not ventured to try the experiment in person),as in many other instances we know that conspicuously-coloured insectsadvertise their nastiness, as it were, to the birds by their owninteguments, and so escape being eaten in mistake for any of their lessprotected relatives.

On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that certain plants haveefficiently armed themselves against the aphides, in turn, by secretingbitter or otherwise unpleasant juices. So far as I can discover, thelittle plunderers seldom touch the pungent ‘nasturtiums’ or tropsaelumsof our flower-gardens, even when these grow side by side with otherplants on which the aphides are swarming. Often, indeed, I find winged

cries the lady, as if on wings of black feathers dead people fly toHeaven, and, lacking them, they must of necessity go elsewhere. Herhusband shakes his head; and further adds, that they had seed-cakeinstead of plum-cake, and that it was all white wine. ?All white wine!?exclaims his wife. ?Nothing but sherry and madeira,? says the husband.?What! no port?? ?Not a drop.? No port, no plums, and no feathers!?You will recollect, my dear,? says the formal lady, in a voice ofstately reproof, ?that when we first met this poor man who is now deadand gone, and he took that very strange course of addressing me atdinner without being previously introduced, I ventured to express myopinion that the family were quite ignorant of etiquette, and veryimperfectly acquainted with the decencies of life. You have now had agood opportunity of judging for yourself, and all I have to say is, thatI trust you will never go to a funeral /there/ again.? ?My dear,?replies the formal gentleman, ?I never will.? So the informal deceasedis cut in his grave; and the formal couple, when they tell the story ofthe funeral, shake their heads, and wonder what some people?s feelings/are/ made of, and what their notions of propriety /can/ be!

If the formal couple have a family (which they sometimes have), they arenot children, but little, pale, sour, sharp-nosed men and women; and soexquisitely brought up, that they might be very old dwarfs for anythingthat appeareth to the contrary. Indeed, they are so acquainted withforms and conventionalities, and conduct themselves with such strictdecorum, that to see the little girl break a looking-glass in some wildoutbreak, or the little boy kick his parents, would be to any visitor anunspeakable relief and consolation.

The formal couple are always sticklers for what is rigidly proper, andhave a great readiness in detecting hidden impropriety of speech orthought, which by less scrupulous people would be wholly unsuspected.Thus, if they pay a visit to the theatre, they sit all night in aperfect agony lest anything improper or immoral should proceed from thestage; and if anything should happen to be said which admits of a doubleconstruction, they never fail to take it up directly, and to express bytheir looks the great outrage which their feelings have sustained.Perhaps this is their chief reason for absenting themselves almostentirely from places of public amusement. They go sometimes to theExhibition of the Royal Academy;?but that is often more shocking thanthe stage itself, and the formal lady thinks that it really is high timeMr. Etty was prosecuted and made a public example of.

We made one at a christening party not long since, where there wereamongst the guests a formal couple, who suffered the acutest torturefrom certain jokes, incidental to such an occasion, cut?and very likelydried also?by one of the godfathers; a red-faced elderly gentleman, who,being highly popular with the rest of the company, had it all his ownway, and was in great spirits. It was at supper-time that thisgentleman came out in full force. We?being of a grave and quietdemeanour?had been chosen to escort the formal lady down-stairs, and,

forms upon the leaf-stem of a nasturtium, having come there evidently inhopes of starting a new colony; but usually in a dead or dyingcondition–the pungent juice seems to have poisoned them. So, too,spinach and lettuce may be covered with blight, while the bitterspurges, the woolly-leaved arabis, and the strong-scented thyme close byare utterly untouched. Plants seem to have acquired all these devices,such as close networks of hair upon the leaves, strong essences, bitteror pungent juices, and poisonous principles, mainly as deterrents forinsect enemies, of which caterpillars and plant-lice are by far the mostdestructive. It would be unpardonable, of course, to write abouthoney-dew without mentioning tobacco; and I may add parenthetically thataphides are determined anti-tobacconists, nicotine, in fact, being adeadly poison to them. Smoking with tobacco, or sprinkling withtobacco-water, are familiar modes of getting rid of the unwelcomeintruders in gardens. Doubtless this peculiar property of the tobaccoplant has been developed as a prophylactic against insect enemies: andif so, we may perhaps owe the weed itself, as a smokable leaf, to thelittle aphides. Granting this hypothetical connection, the name ofhoney-dew would indeed be a peculiarly appropriate one. I may mention inpassing that tobacco is quite fatal to almost all insects, a fact whichI present gratuitously to the blowers of counterblasts, who are atliberty to make whatever use they choose of it. Quassia and aloes arealso well-known preventives of fly or blight in gardens.

The most complete life-history yet given of any member of the aphisfamily is that which M. Jules Lichtenstein has worked out with so muchcare in the case of the phylloxera of the oak-tree. In April, the wintereggs of this species, laid in the bark of an oak, each hatch out awingless imperfect female, which M. Lichtenstein calls the foundress.After moulting four times, the foundress produces, by parthenogenesis, anumber of false eggs, which it fastens to the leaf-stalks and under sideof the foliage. These false eggs hatch out a larval form, wingless, butbigger than any of the subsequent generations; and the larvae so producedthemselves once more give origin to more larvae, which acquire wings, andfly away from the oak on which they were born to another of a differentspecies in the same neighbourhood. There these larvae of the second croponce more lay false eggs, from which the third larval generation isdeveloped. This brood is again wingless, and it proceeds at once to budout several generations more, by internal gemmation, as long as the warmweather lasts. According to M. Lichtenstein, all previous observationshave been made only on aphides of this third type; and he maintains thatevery species in the whole family really undergoes an analogousalternation of generations. At last, when the cold weather begins to setin, a fourth larval form appears, which soon obtains wings, and fliesback to the same kind of oak on which the foundresses were first hatchedout, all the intervening generations having passed their lives insucking the juices of the other oak to which the second larval formmigrated. The fourth type here produce perfect male and female insects,which are wingless, and have no sucking apparatus. The females, afterbeing impregnated, lay a single egg each, which they hide in the bark,

where it remains during the winter, till in spring it once more hatchesout into a foundress, and the whole cycle begins over again. Whether allthe aphides do or do not pass through corresponding stages is not yetquite certain. But Kentish farmers believe that the hop-fly migrates tohop-bines from plum-trees in the neighbourhood; and M. Lichtensteinconsiders that such migrations from one plant to another are quitenormal in the family. We know, indeed, that many great plagues of ourcrops are thus propagated, sometimes among closely related plants, butsometimes also among the most widely separated species. For example,turnip-fly (which is not an aphis, but a small beetle) always begins itsravages (as Miss Ormerod has abundantly shown) upon a plot of charlock,and then spreads from patches of that weed to the neighbouring turnips,which are slightly diverse members of the same genus. But, on the otherhand, it has long been well known that rust in wheat is speciallyconnected with the presence of the barberry bush; and it has recentlybeen proved that the fungus which produces the disease passes its earlystages on the barberry leaves, and only migrates in later generations tothe growing wheat. This last case brings even more prominently intolight than ever the essential resemblance of the aphides toplant-parasites.

THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT

For many centuries the occult problem how to account for the milk in thecoco-nut has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenuousinfancy and of maturer scientific age. Though it cannot be truthfullyaffirmed of it, as of the cosmogony or creation of the world, in the’Vicar of Wakefield,’ that it ‘has puzzled the philosophers of all ages’(for Sanchoniathon was certainly ignorant of the very existence of thatdelicious juice, and Manetho doubtless went to his grave without everhaving tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical verandah), yet itmay be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years thephilosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated uponthat abstruse question is unworthy of such an exalted name. Thecosmogony and the milk in the coco-nut are, however, a great deal closertogether in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue whoquoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest moments, tohave imagined.

The coco-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the mostsympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful humanity. No otherplant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It hasbeen truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is allgood, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even thepig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries–fromtooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine wine to pork

pies–does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of hisvirtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying coco-nut. A Chineseproverb says that there are as many useful properties in the coco-nutpalm as there are days in the year; and a Polynesian saying tells usthat the man who plants a coco-nut plants meat and drink, hearth andhome, vessels and clothing, for himself and his children after him. Likethe great Mr. Whiteley, the invaluable palm-tree might modestlyadvertise itself as a universal provider. The solid part of the nutsupplies food almost alone to thousands of people daily, and the milkserves them for drink, thus acting as an efficient filter to the waterabsorbed by the roots in the most polluted or malarious regions. If youtap the flower stalk you get a sweet juice, which can be boiled downinto the peculiar sugar called (in the charming dialect of commerce)jaggery; or it can be fermented into a very nasty spirit known aspalm-wine, toddy, or arrack; or it can be mixed with bitter herbs androots to make that delectable compound ‘native beer.’ If you squeeze thedry nut you get coco-nut oil, which is as good as lard for frying whenfresh, and is ‘an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast,’ ontropical tables. Under the mysterious name of copra (which most of ushave seen with awe described in the market reports as ‘firm’ or ‘weak,”receding’ or ’steady’) it forms the main or only export of many Oceanicislands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where thethicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candleswith fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning inordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; andit enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. Thefibre that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article ofcommerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven intococo-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are alsomade of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, inplace of real horse-hair in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half,supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians,Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learntthe true methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. Theleaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared likepapyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the longmid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answeradmirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the baseis a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for strainers,wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or stem, passes in carpentryunder the name of porcupine wood, and produces beautiful effects as awonderfully coloured cabinet-makers’ material. These are only a fewselected instances out of the innumerable uses of the coco-nut palm.

Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that bears it, the milkitself has many and great claims to our respect and esteem, as everybodywho has ever drunk it in its native surroundings will enthusiasticallyadmit. In England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a verypoor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavoured, and rather indigestible. Butin the tropics, coco-nut milk, or, as we oftener call it there, coco-nut

water, is a very different and vastly superior sort of beverage. Ateleven o’clock every morning, when you are hot and tired with the day’swork, your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean whitelinen suit, brings you in a tall soda glass full of a clear, light,crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the yellow background of achased Benares brass-work tray. The lump of ice bobs enticingly up anddown in the centre of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edgeof the glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfullyand swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure asan English hillside spring, delicate as–well, as coco-nut water. Nonebut itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious,dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there,and what is it for?

In the early green stage at which coco-nuts are generally picked forhousehold use in the tropics the shell hasn’t yet solidified into a hardstony coat, but still remains quite soft enough to be readily cutthrough with a sharp table knife–just like young walnuts picked forpickling. If you cut one across while it’s in this unsophisticatedstate, it is easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and thepart borne by the milk in the development and growth of the mature nut.The ordinary tropical way of opening coco-nuts for table, indeed, is bycutting off the top of the shell and rind in successive slices, at theend where the three pores are situated, until you reach the level of thewater, which fills up the whole interior. The nutty part around theinside of the shell is then extremely soft and jelly-like, so that itcan be readily eaten with a spoon; but as a matter of fact very fewpeople ever do eat the flesh at all. After their first few months in thetropics, they lose the taste for this comparatively indigestible part,and confine themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) todrinking the water. A young coco-nut is thus seen to consist, first of agreen outer skin, then of a fibrous coat, which afterwards becomes thehair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; whileinside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself. The office of thecoco-nut water is the deposition of the nutty part around the side ofthe shell; it is, so to speak, the mother liquid, from which the hardereatable portion is afterwards derived. This state is not uncommon inembryo seeds. In a very young pea, for example, the inside is quitewatery, and only the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observedwhen green peas first come into season. But the special peculiarity ofthe coco-nut consists in the fact that this liquid condition of theinterior continues even after the nut is ripe, and that is the reallycurious point about the milk in the coco-nut which does actually needaccounting for.

In order to understand it one ought to examine a coco-nut in the act ofbudding, and to do this it is by no means necessary to visit the WestIndies or the Pacific Islands; all you need to do is to ask a CoventGarden fruit salesman to get you a few ‘growers.’ On the voyage toEngland, a certain number of precocious coco-nuts, stimulated by the

sitting beside her, had a favourable opportunity of observing her emotions.

We have a shrewd suspicion that, in the very beginning, and in the firstblush?literally the first blush?of the matter, the formal lady had notfelt quite certain whether the being present at such a ceremony, andencouraging, as it were, the public exhibition of a baby, was not an actinvolving some degree of indelicacy and impropriety; but certain we arethat when that baby?s health was drunk, and allusions were made, by agrey-headed gentleman proposing it, to the time when he had dandled inhis arms the young Christian?s mother,?certain we are that then theformal lady took the alarm, and recoiled from the old gentleman as froma hoary profligate. Still she bore it; she fanned herself with anindignant air, but still she bore it. A comic song was sung, involvinga confession from some imaginary gentleman that he had kissed a female,and yet the formal lady bore it. But when at last, the health of thegodfather before-mentioned being drunk, the godfather rose to returnthanks, and in the course of his observations darkly hinted at babiesyet unborn, and even contemplated the possibility of the subject of thatfestival having brothers and sisters, the formal lady could endure nomore, but, bowing slightly round, and sweeping haughtily past theoffender, left the room in tears, under the protection of the formalgentleman.

THE LOVING COUPLE

There cannot be a better practical illustration of the wise saw andancient instance, that there may be too much of a good thing, than ispresented by a loving couple. Undoubtedly it is meet and proper thattwo persons joined together in holy matrimony should be loving, andunquestionably it is pleasant to know and see that they are so; butthere is a time for all things, and the couple who happen to be alwaysin a loving state before company, are well-nigh intolerable.

And in taking up this position we would have it distinctly understoodthat we do not seek alone the sympathy of bachelors, in whose objectionto loving couples we recognise interested motives and personalconsiderations. We grant that to that unfortunate class of societythere may be something very irritating, tantalising, and provoking, inbeing compelled to witness those gentle endearments and chasteinterchanges which to loving couples are quite the ordinary business oflife. But while we recognise the natural character of the prejudice towhich these unhappy men are subject, we can neither receive theirbiassed evidence, nor address ourself to their inflamed and angeredminds. Dispassionate experience is our only guide; and in these moralessays we seek no less to reform hymeneal offenders than to hold out atimely warning to all rising couples, and even to those who have not yet

congenial warmth and damp of most shipholds, usually begin to sproutbefore their time; and these waste nuts are sold by the dealers at a lowrate to East-end children and inquiring botanists. An examination of a’grower’ very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in thecoco-nut.

It must be duly borne in mind, to begin with, that the prime end andobject of the nut is not to be eaten raw by the ingenious monkey, or tobe converted by lordly man into coco-nut biscuits, or coco-nut pudding,but simply and solely to reproduce the coco-nut palm in sufficientnumbers to future generations. For this purpose the nut has slowlyacquired by natural selection a number of protective defences againstits numerous enemies, which serve to guard it admirably in the nativestate from almost all possible animal depredators. First of all, theactual nut or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed justinside 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 feedand support it during its earliest unprotected days, if not otherwisediverted by man or monkey. But as whatever feeds a young plant will alsofeed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire toappropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palmfor the use of its own seedling, the coco-nut has been compelled toinclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid anddefensive shell. And, once more, since the palm grows at a very greatheight from the ground–I have seen them up to ninety feet in favourablecircumstances–this shell stands a very good chance of getting broken intumbling to the earth, so that it has been necessary to surround it witha mass of soft and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, andacts 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 thecontinuous survival of the best adapted amid numberless and endlessspontaneous variations of all its kind in past time.

Now, when the coco-nut has actually reached the ground at last, andproceeds to sprout in the spot where chance (perhaps in the bodily shapeof a disappointed monkey) has chosen to cast it, these numeroussafeguards and solid envelopes naturally begin to prove decidednuisances to the embryo within. It starts under the great disadvantageof being hermetically sealed within a solid wooden shell, so that nowater can possibly get at it to aid it as most other seeds are aided inthe process of germination. Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious tosprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeablesealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate theunfortunate predicament of a grower coco-nut. Natural selection,however–that _deus ex machina_ of modern science, which can performsuch endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in andvariations enough to work upon–natural selection has come to the rescueof the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of theshell, out of which it can push its feathery green head withoutdifficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at the sharp end of a

coco-nut you will see three little brown pits or depressions on itssurface. Most people also know that two of these are firmly stopped up(for a reason to which I shall presently recur), but that the third oneis only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can be easilybored through with a pocket knife, so as to let the milk run off beforecracking the shell. So much we have all learnt during our ardent pursuitof natural knowledge on half-holidays in early life. But we probablythen failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a smallroundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable portion, which knob is infact the embryo palm or seedling, for whose ultimate benefit the wholearrangement (in brown and green) has been invented. That is very muchthe way with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite, and omitsall the really important parts of the whole subject. _We_ think the useof the hole is to let out the milk; but the nut knows that its realobject is to let out the seedling. The knob grows out at last into theyoung plantlet, and it is by means of the soft hole that it makes itsescape through the shell to the air and the sunshine which it seekswithout. This brings us really down at last to the true _raison d’etre_for the milk in the coco-nut. As the seed or kernel cannot easily get atmuch water from outside, it has a good supply of water laid up for itready beforehand within its own encircling shell. The mother liquid fromwhich the pulp or nutty part has been deposited remains in the centre,as the milk, till the tiny embryo begins to sprout. As soon as it doesso, the little knob which was at first so very small enlarges rapidlyand absorbs the water, till it grows out into a big spongy cellularmass, which at last almost fills up the entire shell. At the same time,its other end pushes its way out through the soft hole, and then givesbirth to a growing bud at the top–the future stem and leaves–and to anumber of long threads beneath–the future roots. Meanwhile, the spongymass inside begins gradually to absorb all the nutty part, using up itsoils and starches for the purpose of feeding the young plant above,until it is of an age to expand its leaves to the open tropical sunlightand shift for itself in the struggle for life. It seems at first sightvery hard to understand how any tissue so solid as the pulp of coco-nutcan be thus softened and absorbed without any visible cause; but in thesubtle chemistry of living vegetation such a transformation iscomparatively simple and easy to perform. Nature sometimes works muchgreater miracles than this in the same way: for example, what is calledvegetable ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turnedonly with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another palm-nut,allied to the coco-palm, and its very stony particles are all similarlyabsorbed during germination by the dissolving power of the youngseedling.

Why, however, has the coco-nut three pores at the top instead of one,and why are two out of the three so carefully and firmly sealed up? Theexplanation of this strange peculiarity is only to be found in theancestral history of the coco-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start intheir earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more seeds each;but as they ripen, all the seeds except one become abortive. The almond,

for example, has in the flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but inthe ripe state there is generally only one, though occasionally we findan almond with two–a philipoena, as we commonly call it–just tokeep in memory the original arrangement of its earlier ancestors. Thereason for this is that plants whose fruits have no special protectionfor their seeds are obliged to produce a great many of them at once, inorder that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts oftheir Argus-eyed enemies; but when they learn to protect themselves byhard coverings from birds and beasts, they can dispense with some ofthese supernumerary seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of thosethat they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable smallround seedlets of the poppyhead with the solitary large and richlystored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cresswith the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and theacorn. To the very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as ifthey meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored andunprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only at the lastmoment that they recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules exceptone, and store that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs attheir disposal. The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience thatit is better to be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up inlife with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor familyof thirteen needy and unprovided children.

Now, the coco-nuts are descended from a great tribe–the palms andlilies–which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity thearrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. Forexample, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there arethree green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-coloured petals, three longouter stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the capsule,and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms stillkeep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them whichhave specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost intheir later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possessonly one seed, often a very large one. There is no better and moretypical nut in the whole world than a coco-nut–that is to say, from ourpresent point of view at least, though the fear of that awful person,the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not quitetechnically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that thecoco-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightfulinformation, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which heis so great a master, that it is really ‘a drupaceous fruit with afibrous mesocarp.’ Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nicehair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large willstill call a nut a nut, and that the coco-nut is the highest knowndevelopment of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and mostrichly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed is surrounded byone of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. Hence thecoco-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three kernels whicheach nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce. But