identify their lives with the lives of their
trees: from the prosperity or misfortunes of
which they augur their own fate. The ideas
of M. Flourens and other physiologists,
who think man was intended to live a
century, are confirmed by the experience
of the inhabitants of the tropics. Abd-Allah
ben Abd-el-Kader, in his narrative of
his Voyage along the Eastern coast of the
Peninsula of Malacca in eighteen hundred
and thirty-eight, relates an anecdote which
is illustrative of the double biographies of
the Indians and their palms. He entered
into a village in the Kalanthan country, where
grew coco-palms, dourians (Durio Zibethinus),
and all sorts of fruit-trees. While walking,
he observed an old woman about the height
of a child of twelve, her back bent with age,
her skin all wrinkled into ridges, and her
hair, which was not four fingers long, as
white as carded cotton. She was near a
spring, and carried a pitcher full of water.
He told Temana and Grandpre to wait for
him a little, because he wished to talk with
woman and learn her age. She
replied:

"I have already seen one coco-palm die;
after which, I have planted another, which
is already grown old, and does not give me
any more than a few rare and little fruits."
By this she intimated that she was about a
century and a half old.

Indeed, the good and evil of human nature
mingle more or less with this invaluable
tree. When the natives of New
Caledonia made war upon the inhabitants of
neighbouring islands, they used to make a
point of destroying all the fruit-trees, and
especially the coco-palms, of their enemies.
Among themselves, the owner of much
cultivated land and of many coco-palms
was deemed a great chief. The Tiko-pians,
wishing to preserve the Mitre island, or
Fatacca, for the shark-fishing, are careful
to destroy all the coco-palms upon it, lest
their neighbours should be attracted by
seeing them to come and occupy it. The
improvident and reckless inhabitants of many
islands, having allowed themselves to depend
almost exclusively upon their fruit-trees for
sustenance, are sometimes reduced to famine
by hurricanes and bad seasons. When thus
overtaken by calamity, the more desperate of
them embark in canoes, and, committing
themselves to the currents and the waves,
in the hope of finding more favoured
shores, depart to be heard of no more.
Europeans, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and
English have, since they began to voyage in
the tropical seas, set useful examples to the
natives of intelligence, industry, and foresight
in the culture of the coco-palms. Britons
have especially distinguished themselves by
planting their heads in the soils of the shores'
palms. Dr. Charles Reynaud records numerous
cases in which English-speaking men
have planted cocos where they were unknown
before, and have obtained four or five fold
more fruit from their well-tended trees than
were yielded by the neglected palms of the
natives. Ceylon appears to be the only
place where the steam-engine is applied to
the extraction of coco oil.

Persons who have only seen the coco-
palms of Ceylon or the Mauritius, must not
estimate the vital forces of these trees by
their limited observation. The wild vitality
of the coco-palms is only to be seen on the
shores of the coco-islands between the
fifteenth of northern and the twelfth of southern
latitude. Their natural soil is the coral sand.
Polypes, or little animals, of a structure so
simple that they have been said, not quite
correctly, to be nothing but stomachs, or
sacks alive, possess the faculty of secreting
lodgings for themselves with their bases
and sides. The calcareous secretions join
each other and form what are called animal
plants, which were long mistaken for plants
of which the animals were only the flowers.
These animals are innumerable as the sands
of the sea-shore, and many islands have been
formed by them. The waves of the sea
pound the exposed coral reefs into dust, which
is thrown as white sand over the compact
reefs, and forms the coral or madrepore
shores. On the shores already made, the coco-
palms are shedding their fruits all the year
round, and what Bernardin de Saint Pierre
deemed a summons to a banquet, the fall of
the nuts,is really a phase in the wheel of coco
life. The nuts are washed away by the
waves, and are carried by the currents, until
growing heavy and saturated with sea-water,
they are left to germinate upon far-distant
coasts and newly-formed islands. Cocos have
sometimes been borne by the currents as far
north as the coasts of Scotland and Norway.
The first coco I ever saw, was washed ashore
upon the sands at Aberdeen. The fall of the
nuts is the preliminary of the process of
seed-sowing, which is effected by the
machinery of the ocean currents. The coco-
palms love the newest coral sands—the
secretions of animals at work everywhere and at
this hour, and their very soil is impregnated
with animality. The madrepore sand is
interlaced to form the bases of the noble palm
column, and the frequent rains pour down
their sides while the warm currents and high-
tide waves of the tropics lave the long roots
of a tree, which may be said to be naturally
far more a product of the ocean than of the
earth.

Of course there are many varieties of coco-
palms. Some of the dwarf kinds are not
much bigger than umbrellas. Several
varieties are not good to eat. There are spherical
cocos, and needle cocos, distinguished by
peculiarities in the forms of the nuts.
Differences of colour mark other races of cocos
(the words races, breeds, varieties, and
sometimes, I may say, by the way species, are
synonymes), and there are red, black, and