PLANT HYBRIDIZATION BEFORE MENDEL ii 



that date palms were of two sorts, male and female, and that they 

 apparently utilized this knowledge in a practical way, by resort- 

 ing to the artificial pollination of the female trees, in order to 

 make them hear more abundantly. This would naturally give rise 

 to some sort of a conception of sex in the plant as a kind of 

 analogy, but in the absence of evidence of the means and processes 

 of fecundation the conception of plant-sex would be apt to re- 

 main long a poetic idea rather than a scientific conclusion. The 

 Arabs, at all events, have continued the practice of the pollination 

 of the palm uninterruptedly down to the present (12b) and, indeed, 

 they seem to have had an idea that the date palm possessed sex 

 somewhat in the same sense in which it exists in the animal king- 

 dom. The Arabic writer Kazwini (circa a.d. 1283), to whom refer- 

 ence has already been made, says plainly in the book entitled 

 "Of the Marvels of Nature, and of the Singularities of Created 

 Things" ; 



"The date has a striking resemblance to man, through the beauty of 

 its erect and slender figure, its division into two distinct s^xes, and the 

 property, which is peculiar to it, of being fecundated by a sort of 

 union." 



However, the lesson which the date palm might have been sup- 

 posed to teach, namely, that plants possess sex and that breeding 

 can be conducted with them as with animals, appears to have been 

 lost sight of. Even in those regions where the date was habitually 

 grown, the idea which the long-continued practice of artificial pol- 

 lination might have suggested — that it was possible to breed 

 and improve other plants in like manner — appears never to have 

 arisen. It would perhaps be thought that the ancient Babylonians, 

 having learned the art of artificial crossing in the case of one 

 plant, would have applied the same process to others. The reason 

 for their failure to do so, however, is explainable. No other eco- 

 nomic plants with which they came into contact in their fields 

 were similarly dioecious. They did not, for example, chance to 

 possess an annual species like Indian corn, in which, on one and 

 the same plant, the male and female flowers are in separate in- 

 florescences, in which the pollination is a conspicuous fact, and 

 in which crossing not only can be seen to be continually taking 

 place in nature, but likewise can easily be carried out by artificial 

 means. It is to be remembered that the artificial pollination of the 



