The cocoa-nut (as the name Cocos Islands indicates) is the characteristic production, and is cultivated on all the islands. There are a few other trees (Sir E. Owen described seven kinds in 1830) and lesser plants; but the whole flora, exclusive of recent introductions, comprises less than thirty species. Of the twenty species, however, represented in Mr Darwin’s collection, “nineteen belonged to different genera, and these again to no less than sixteen families.” With the exception of man and the domestic pig, the rat appears to be the only mammal in the islands; and there are no true land birds, except domestic poultry. One of the commonest living creatures is a monstrous crab which lives on the cocoa-nuts; and in some places also there are great colonies of the pomegranate crab, which, to quote Mr Forbes, is “labouring assiduously to make the soft pure white calcareous mud into tree-inhabitable land.” The climate is temperate and extremely healthy. Terrific storms sometimes break over the island; and it has been more than once visited by earthquakes. The inhabitants “are well developed, strong, and of a wonderfully healthy appearance”; they belong originally to various parts of the Indian archipelago, Borneo, Sumatra, Celebes, &c.

The Keeling Islands were discovered in 1609 by William Keeling on his way home from the Moluccas. In 1823 Alexander Hare, an English adventurer, settled on the southmost island with a number of slaves. Some two or three years after, a Scotchman, J. Ross, who had commanded a brig during the English occupation of Java, settled with his family on Direction Island, and his little colony was soon strengthened by Hare’s runaway slaves. The Dutch Government had in an informal way claimed the possession of the islands since 1829; but they refused to allow Ross to hoist the Dutch flag, and accordingly the place was taken under British protection in 1856. In 1878 it was attached to the government of Ceylon.

Besides Mr Darwin's Journal of the Voyages of the Beagle (1860) and the work already mentioned, see Henry O. Forbes in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., December 1879 (with a good map); Koner in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., 1881; A. vender Jagt in Verh. Bat. Gen. van K. en ∏ r ., xiii.; J. J. Duintjer in Tindal and Swaart’s Zeewezen, lv.; Voyage of Swedish Frigate “Eugenie” (Berlin, 1856), and Bleeker’s papers on ichthyology in Natuurk. Tijdschr. van Ned. Ind., vii., viii., xv., <fcc.