the raw state about
twelve inches the long way--he tears off all the coarse fibre bit by
bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he hammers away with
his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole till he has pounded an opening
right through it. This done he twists round his body so as to turn his
back upon the coco-nut he is operating upon (crabs are never famous
either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds awkwardly but
effectually to extract all the white kernel or pulp through the breach
with his narrow pair of hind pincers. Like man, too, the robber-crab
knows the value of the outer husk as well as of the eatable nut itself,
for he collects the fibre in surprising quantities to line his burrow,
and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious couch. Alas,
however, for the helplessness of crabs, and the rapacity and cunning of
all-appropriating man! The spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the
sake of the fibre it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking
junk on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab who has
laid it all up, while he melts down the great lump of fat under the
robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets from it as much as a good
quart of what may be practically considered as limpid coco-nut oil. _Sic
vos non vobis_ is certainly the melancholy refrain of all 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