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I suppose you know what cannibals are—savages who kill and eat each other. They used to live on little islands in the Pacific Ocean, which is the biggest, broadest, deepest ocean of all. The Atlantic Ocean has very few islands in it—you could cross the Atlantic without seeing a single island, but in the Southern Pacific Ocean there are thousands of islands, and if you were shipwrecked there you would probably be in sight of one. Many of these islands are so tiny that they are only specks on the map, and some of them are not on the map at all.
If you could drain all the water out of the Pacific Ocean as you drain water out of a bathtub, you would not see a level bottom but thousands of mountains all over the bottom. These mountains were once volcanoes, but they are now drowned by the ocean. Where their tops are high enough to reach above the water you see islands. In the warm water around these islands live the tiny little sea animals called polyps, which I told you made Florida. Their tiny little bones pile up until they reach the top of the water and form rings round these mountain tops. These we call coral islands.
On some of these coral islands live brown-skinned people who once were cannibals; on other islands no one lives. On all these islands grows a tree from which the native gets his food, drink, clothing, house, and furniture. This tree is the cocoanut -palm. I have told you before of that other palm on which dates grow. The cocoanut-palm has a tall trunk with all the leaves at the top, and in the center of the cluster of leaves grows a bunch of cocoanuts.
Cocoanuts are about the size of a baby’s head. There is a shuck around the outside, and when this is taken off, the nut is inside. Strange to say, the cocoanut has what looks like two eyes, a mouth and a sort of coarse brownish hair.
