There is no better and more
typical nut in the whole world than a coco-nut--that is to say, from our
present point of view at least, though the fear of that awful person,
the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not quite
technically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the
coco-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful
information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he
is so great a master, that it is really 'a drupaceous fruit with a
fibrous mesocarp.' Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice
hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will
still call a nut a nut, and that the coco-nut is the highest known
development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most
richly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed is surrounded by
one of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. Hence the
coco-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three kernels which
each nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce. But
though the palm has thus taken to reducing the number of its seeds in
each fruit to the lowest possible point consistent with its continued
existence at all, it still goes on retaining many signs of its ancient
threefold arrangement. The ancestral and most deeply ingrained habits
persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature form that the
later acquired habits begin fully to predominate.
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