art around the
inside of the shell is then extremely soft and jelly-like, so that it
can be readily eaten with a spoon; but as a matter of fact very few
people ever do eat the flesh at all. After their first few months in the
tropics, they lose the taste for this comparatively indigestible part,
and confine themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) to
drinking the water. A young coco-nut is thus seen to consist, first of a
green outer skin, then 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 anim