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Why, however, has the coco-nut three pores at the top instead of one, and why are two out of the three so carefully and firmly sealed up? The explanation of this strange peculiarity is only to be found in the ancestral history of the coco-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start in their earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more seeds each; but as they ripen, all the seeds except one become abortive. The almond, for example, has in the flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but in the ripe state there is generally only one, though occasionally we find an almond with two–a philipoena, as we commonly call it–just to keep in memory the original arrangement of its earlier ancestors. The reason for this is that plants whose fruits have no special protection for their seeds are obliged to produce a great many of them at once, in order that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts of their Argus-eyed enemies; but when they learn to protect themselves by hard coverings from birds and beasts, they can dispense with some of these supernumerary seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of those that they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable small round seedlets of the poppyhead with the solitary large and richly stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress with the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and the acorn. To the very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if they meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and unprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only at the last moment that they recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules except one, and store that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs at their disposal. The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience that it is better to be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in life with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor family of thirteen needy and unprovided children.

Now, the coco-nuts are descended from a great tribe–the palms and lilies–which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity the arrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. For example, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there are three green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-coloured petals, three long outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the capsule, and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms still keep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them which have specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in their later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess only one seed, often a very large one. 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. 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.