For that part of the bulletin which touches upon the botany of the cocoanut I am indebted to Don Regino Garcia, associate botanist of the Forestry Bureau; for that relating to its products and local uses, to the courtesy of manufacturers in Laguna; and, for the rest, to personal experience and observations made in Laguna Province and in the southern Visayan Islands where, as elsewhere in this Archipelago, the cocoanut may properly be considered a spontaneous and not a cultivated product. HISTORY. The legendary history of the "Prince of Palms," [1] as it has been called, dates back to a period when the Christian era was young, and its history is developing day by day in some new and striking manifestation of its utility or beauty. It seems not unreasonable to assume that much of the earlier traditionary history of the cocoanut may have been inspired as much by its inherent beauty as by its uses. Such traditional proverbs Or folklore as I have gathered in the Visayas recognize the influence of the beautiful, in so far as the blessings of the trees only inure to the good; for instance, "He who is cruel to his beast or his family will only harvest barren husks from the reproving trees that witness the pusillanimous act;" and, again, "He who grinds the poor will only grind water instead of fat oil from the meat." To this day the origin of the cocoanut is unknown. De Candolle (Origin of Cult. Plants, p. 574) recites twelve specific claims pointing to an Asiatic origin, and a single, but from a scientific standpoint almost unanswerable, contention for an American derivation. None of the remaining nineteen species of the genus Cocos are known to exist elsewhere in the world than on the American continent. His review of the story results in the nature of a compromise, assigning to our own Islands and those to the south and west of us the distinction of having first given birth to the cocoanut, and that thence it was disseminated east and west by ocean currents. BOTANY. The cocoanut (Cocos nucifera Linn.) is the sole oriental representative of a tropical genus comprising nineteen species, restricted, with this single exception, to the New World. Its geographical distribution is closely confined to the two Tropics. [2] Not less than nineteen varieties of C. nucifera are described by Miquel and Rumphius, and all are accepted by Filipino authors. Whether all of these varieties are constant enough to deserve recognition need not be considered here. Many are characterized by the fruits being distinctly globular, others by fruits of a much prolonged oval form, still others by having the lower end of the fruit terminating in a triangular point.