Introduction.

The following pages are written chiefly in the interests of the planter, but the writer feels that the great agricultural importance which the cocoanut palm is bound to assume in these Islands is sufficient to justify the presentation of some of its history and botany.

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.