Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/59

Rh name of copra (which most of us have seen with awe described in the market reports as "firm" or "weak," "receding" or "steady") it forms the main or only export of many oceanic islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The fiber that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article of commerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven into cocoa-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, in place of real horse-hair, in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learned the true methods of civilized machine-made shoddy manufacture. The leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base is a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for strainers, wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or stem, passes in carpentry under the name of porcupine-wood, and produces beautiful effects as a wonderfully-colored cabinet-maker's material. These are only a few selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the cocoa-nut palm.

Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that bears it, the milk itself has many and great claims to our respect and esteem, as everybody who has ever drunk it in its native surroundings will enthusiastically admit. In England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a very poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavored and rather indigestible. But in the tropics, cocoa-nut milk, or, as we oftener call it there, cocoa-nut water, is a very different and vastly superior sort of beverage. At eleven o'clock every morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's work, your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean white linen suit, brings you in a tall soda-glass full of a clear, light, crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the yellow background of a chased Benares brass-work tray. The lump of ice bobs enticingly up and down in the center of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edge of the glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfully and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure as an English hill-side spring, delicate as—well, as cocoa-nut water. None but itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious, dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there, and what is it for?

In the early green stage at which cocoa-nuts are generally picked