Even so our own boys
pass through an essentially savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows
and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as a
romantic boyhood of mediaeval chivalry and adventure, before they steady
down into that crowning glory of our race, the solid, sober,
matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence the coco-nut in its
unstripped state is roughly triangular in form, its angles answering to
the separate three fruits of simpler palms; and it has three pits or
weak places in the shell, through which the embryos of the three
original kernels used to force their way out. But as only one of them is
now needed, that one alone is left soft; the other two, which would be
merely a source of weakness to the plant if unprotected, are covered in
the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless they serve in part to
deceive the too inquisitive monkey or other enemy, who probably
concludes that if one of the pits is hard and impermeable, the other two
are so likewise.
Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for the milk in the
coco-nut, and incidentally for some other matters in its economy as
well, I am loth to leave the young seedling whom I have brought so far
on his way to the tender mercies of the winds and storms and tropical
animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his juicy and delicate
shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most palms is a very
pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind--the West Indian mountain
cabbage--deserves a better and more justly descriptive name, for it is
really much more like seakale or asparagus.
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