THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT
For many centuries the occult problem how to account for the milk in the
coco-nut has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenuous
infancy and of maturer scientific age. Though it cannot be truthfully
affirmed 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 that
delicious juice, and Manetho doubtless went to his grave without ever
having tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical verandah), yet it
may be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the
philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated upon
that abstruse question is unworthy of such an exalted name. The
cosmogony and the milk in the coco-nut are, however, a great deal closer
together in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who
quoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest moments, to
have imagined.
The coco-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the most
sympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful humanity. No other
plant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It has
been truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all
good, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even the
pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries--from
tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine wine to pork
pies--does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of his
virtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying coco-nut.
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