d not been discovered growing in any locality whatever; that the nut
was sometimes found floating on the Indian Ocean, or thrown on the
coast of Malabar, but more frequently picked up on the shores of a
group of islands known as the Maldives; from the latter circumstance,
the naturalists of the day termed it _Cocus Maldivicus_--the Maldivian
cocoa-nut. Garcius, surnamed Ab Horto (of the garden), on account of
his botanical knowledge, a celebrated authority on drugs and spices,
who wrote in 1563, very sensibly concluded that the tree grew on some
undiscovered land, from whence the nuts were carried by the waves to
the places where they were found; other writers considered it to be a
genuine marine production; while a few shrewdly suspected that it
really grew on the Maldives. Unfortunately for the Maldivians, this
last opinion prevailed in India. In 1607, the king of Bengal, with a
powerful fleet and army, invaded the Maldives, conquered and killed
their king, ransacked and plundered the islands, and, having crammed
his ships with an immense booty, sailed back to Bengal--without,
however, discovering the Tree of Solomon, the grand object of the
expedition. Curiously enough, we are indebted to this horrible
invasion for an interesting book of early Eastern travel--the
Bengalese king having released from captivity one Pyrard de Laval, a
French adventurer, who, six years previously, had suffered shipwreck
on those inhospitable islands. Laval's work dispelled the idea that
the nut grew upon the Maldives. He tells us, that it was found
floating in the surf, or thrown up on the sea-shore only; that it was
royal property; and whenever discovered, carried with great ceremony
to the king, a dreadful death being the penalty of any subject
possessing the smallest portion of it.

The leading naturalists of the seventeenth century having the Maldives
thus, in a manner, taken away from beneath their feet, took great
pains to invent a local habitation for this wonderful tree; and at
last they, pretty generally, came to the conclusion, that the vast
peninsula of Southern Hindostan had at one time extended as far as the
Maldives, but by some great convulsion of nature, the intermediate
part between those islands and Cape Comorin had sunk beneath the
waters of the ocean; that the tree or trees had grown thereon, and
still continued to grow on the submerged soil; and the nuts when ripe,
being lighter than water, rose to the surface, instea