74 FLORA OF THE 



There can therefore be no doubt that the Babylonians 

 were acquainted with some important office, which they 

 attributed to the flowers of the male trees, however 

 erroneous their story about the gall-fly may have been. 

 This office, of course, we now call fertilization. More- 

 over, cuneiform inscriptions refer to the date-palm as 

 male and female.^ 



Notwithstanding the Assyrian knowledge of what 

 amounts to fertilization of the date tree, it does not 

 follow that the genius with cone and bucket on the 

 Assyrian monuments had anything to do with the 

 artificial fertilization of date-palms. 



Dr. Tylor's theory seems to have some support when 

 the cone is pointed towards the sacred tree, made up 

 of a date tree, and of ornamentations taken from the 

 head of foliage of the same tree ; but when the cone 

 is pointed towards the back hair of the king,^ or is 

 pointed at the entrance of a city, or temple, or palace, 

 this theory loses all its force, and we must hunt up 

 some other theory, in which not only a fir-cone comes 

 in, but in which a metal bucket takes a proviineiit part.^ 



I set about contemplating the genius with cone and 

 bucket afresh. It flashed across my mind that the 

 whole thing might mean a sprinkling of holy water by 

 means of the fir-cone, used as an ^ aspergilhmi! The 



1 B. and O. R. vol. 4, No. 4, p. 93. 



^ As in No. 2, Nimrood Gallery, British Museum. 



^ (y) P- 93. B. and O. R. vol. 4, No. 4. 



