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 deception; these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But
as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well
think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years
old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm type,
degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and
inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. The
flower, however, is fertilised by the wind, which carries the pollen
grains from one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually
swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slo