country, there are always large plantations of them to supply the extraordinary demand.  The tree thrives best in a low, sandy soil, near the sea, where it will produce fruit in four or five years; whilst in the clayey ground it seldom bears in less than seven to ten years.  As you recede from the coast the growth is proportionably slower, owing to the greater degree of cold among the hills; and it must attain there nearly its full height before it is productive, whereas in the plains a child can generally reach its first fruit from the ground.  Here, said a countryman at Laye, if I plant a coconut or durian-tree I may expect to reap the fruit of it; but in Labun (an inland district) I should only plant for my great-grandchildren.  In some parts where the land is particularly high, neither these, the betel-nut, nor pepper-vines, will produce fruit at all.

It has been remarked by some writer that the date-bearing palm-tree and the coconut are never found to flourish in the same country.  However this may hold good as a general assertion it is a fact that not one tree of that species is known to grow in Sumatra, where the latter, and many others of the palm kind, so much abound.  All the small low islands which lie off the western coast are skirted near the sea-beach so thickly with coconut-trees that their branches touch each other, whilst the interior parts, though not on a higher level, are entirely free from them.  This beyond a doubt is occasioned by the accidental floating of the nuts to the shore, where they are planted by the hand of nature, shoot up, and bear fruit; which, falling when it arrives at maturity, causes a successive reproduction.  Where uninhabited, as is the case with Pulo Mego, one of the southernmost, the nuts become a prey to the rats and squirrels unless when occasionally disturbed by the crews of vessels which go thither to collect cargoes for market on the mainland.  In the same manner, as we are told by Flacourt,* they have been thrown upon a coast of Madagascar and are not there indigenous; as I have been also assured by a native.  Yet it appears that the natives call it voaniou, which is precisely the name by which it is familiarly known in Sumatra, being buah-nior; and v being uniformly substituted for b, and f for p, in the numerous Malayan words occurring in the language of the former island.  On the other hand the singular production to which the appellation of sea-coconut (kalapa laut) has been given, and which is known to be the fruit of a species of borassus growing in one of the Seychelles Islands,** not far from Madagascar, are sometimes floated as far as the Malayan coasts, where they are supposed to be natives of the ocean and were held in high veneration for their miraculous effects in medicine until, about the year 1772, a large cargo of them was brought to Bencoolen by a French vessel, when their character soon fell with their price.

(Footnote.  Histoire de l’isle Madagascar page 127.)