Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to
sprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeable
sealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate the
unfortunate predicament of a grower coco-nut. Natural selection,
however--that _deus ex machina_ of modern science, which can perform
such endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in and
variations enough to work upon--natural selection has come to the rescue
of the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the
shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head without
difficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at the sharp end of a
coco-nut you will see three little brown pits or depressions on its
surface. 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 one
is only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can be easily
bored through with a pocket knife, so as to let the milk run off before
cracking the shell. So much we have all learnt during our ardent pursuit
of natural knowledge on half-holidays in early life. But we probably
then failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a small
roundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable portion, which knob is in
fact the embryo palm or seedling, for whose ultimate benefit the whole
arrangement (in brown and green) has been invented. That is very much
the way with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite, and omits
all the really important parts of the whole subject.
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