India is, that there are no new ideas in India, that nought in India
suffers change, and that as things are, so they have always been. Even
educated Indians are reluctant to admit that things have changed and
that their community has had to submit to education and
improvement--that suttee, for example, was ever an honoured institution
in the province now most advanced. But to the observant student of the
Indian people, the _evolution_ of India is almost as noteworthy as the
more apparent rigidity. There is a flowering plant common in Northern
India, and chiefly notable for the marvel of bearing flowers of
different colours upon the same root. The Hindus call it "the sport of
Krishna"; Mahomedans, "the flower of Abbas"; for the plant is now
incorporate with both the great religions of India, and even with their
far-back beginnings. Yet it is a comparatively recent importation into
India; it is only the flower known in Britain as "the marvel of Peru,"
and cannot have been introduced into India more than three hundred years
ago. It was then that the Portuguese of India and the Spaniards of Peru
were first in touch within the home lands in Europe. In our own day may
be seen the potato and the cauliflower from Europe establishing
themselves upon the dietary of Hindus in defiance of the punctiliously
orthodox. _À fortiori_--strange that we should reason thus from the
trifling to the fundamental, yet not strange to the Anglo-Indian and the
Indian,--_à fortiori_, we shall not be surprised to find novel and alien
ideas taking root in Indian soil.

Seeds, we are told, may be transported to a new soil, either wind-borne
or water-borne, carried in the stomachs of birds, or clinging by their
burs to the fur of animals. In the cocoa-nut, botanists point out, the
cocoa-nut palms possess a most serviceable ark wherein the seed may be
floated in safety over the sea to other shores. It is thus that the
cocoa-nut palm is one of the first of the larger plants to show