552 . BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
—on which I made him confess the jujube fri? must be the fe- 
male:—and some he made with male and female, separate, as in 
man, and he instanced the Date, the Puneer plant, and some 
others. However, he had probably never thought of it before, in 
doing what his fathers had done before him. But how did his 
fathers first find it out? Probably just as the superintendent of 
the commissariat gardens at Kurrachee, who noticed that Dodonwa 
( female), never ripened its seed till this year, when accidentally he 
transplanted another plant of it (which happened to be a male), 
and brought it from a distant part of the gardens near the other. 
(Vide the result in the boxfull of seeds I send you in this parcel.) 
. Next day I got to the Hubb River, separating Scinde from 
Beloochistan, where I found a Cafila from Affghanistan, just arrived 
with Asafætida and Wool. The Asafætida being in skins induced 
me to ask where it came from, (i. e. whether from Khelát, or He- 
rat, or Kandahar,) remembering old Kempfer (Amon. Exoticæ) 
had said, that Herat Asafcetida “utpote mollior pellibus ovinis invo- 
luta,” whereas, Asa Larensis (Mekran and Belooch. Asafcetida,) 
“aridior saccis e foliis palme involuta ;" which palm, by the way, 
is just the Chamerops Ritchiana. I found it came from Herat, 
and that wo Khelât Asafcetida is exported. They gave me a little 
better idea of the /oo£ of the asafcetida plant, and told me it grows 
sparingly, considerably S. of Khelât, and not so very far from 
Kurrachee,—200 miles say. Casting another look of admiration 
at their massive drayman-like figures, long beards, and manly 
faces, I made my salaam, and left them to talk about the English 
Hakeem. | 
-. The next day I passed the defiles at the base of the lofty moun- 
tain Lakan, and to my great joy was surrounded by new faces in 
the plant line. I had hitherto seen but the old familiar features. 
The grey Huphorbia, size of a haycock, just in flower, holding up 
its thick and thorny branches like wax tapers in a chandelier, 
crowded at the ends with the small fleshy flowers, looking like so 
many rubies, and the Googul-stumps, and Balsamodendron-faggots 
(withered sticks), and the large bushes of Capparis aphylla, glaring 
