osit of which is the cream in the green nut. This
is albumen, intended to nourish the young palm till it has grown
leaves enough to feed on the air, and roots enough to feed on the
soil; and the birth of that young palm is in itself a mystery and a
miracle, well worth considering. Much has been written on it, of
which I, unfortunately, have read very little; but I can at least
tell what I have seen with my own eyes.

If you search among the cream-layer at the larger end of the nut,
you will find, gradually separating itself from the mass, a little
white lump, like the stalk of a very young mushroom. That is the
ovule. In that lies the life, the 'forma formativa,' of the future
tree. How that life works, according to its kind, who can tell?
What it does, is this: it is locked up inside a hard woody shell,
and outside that shell are several inches of tough tangled fibre.
How can it get out, as soft and seemingly helpless as a baby's
finger?

All know that there are three eyes in the monkey's face, as the
children call it, at the butt of the nut. Two of these eyes are
blind, and filled up with hard wood. They are rudiments--hints--
that the nut ought to have, perhaps had uncounted ages since, not
one ovule, but three, the type-number in palms. One ovule alone is
left; and that is opposite the one eye which is less blind than the
rest; the eye which a schoolboy feels for with his knife, when he
wants to get out the milk.

As the nut lies upon the sand, in shade, and rain, and heat, that
baby's finger begins boring its way, with unerring aim, out of the
weakest eye. Soft itself, yet with immense wedging power, from the
gradual accretion of tiny cells, it pierces the wood, and then rends
right and left the tough fibrous coat. Just so may be seen--I have
seen--a large flagstone lifted in a night by a crop of tiny soft
toadstools which have suddenly blossomed up beneath it. The baby's
finger protrudes at last, and curves upward toward the light, to
commence the campaign of life: but it has meanwhile established,
like a good strategist, a safe base of operations in its rear, from
which it intends to draw supplies. Into the albuminous cream which
lines the shell, and into the cavity where the milk once was, it
throws out white fibrous vessels, which eat up the albumen for it,
and at last line the whole inside of the shell with a white pith.
The albumen gives it food wherewith