The flowers of hemp are either male (staminate) or 
female (pistillate). Normally an individual plant bears 
either male or female flowers but not both. Male and 
female individuals differ in appearance and longevity, 
the males having conspicuous loose few-leaved inflores- 
cences and dying earlier than the females, which have 
compact more leafy inflorescences with much less con- 
spicuous flowers. 
Growers of hemp have probably always been familiar 
with the differences between male and female plants and 
have long distinguished them as such in a metaphorical 
manner completely opposed to their biological nature. 
According to Lefrane (1905), Antoine Rabelais, the 
father of Francois Rabelais (c. 1494-1553), grew much 
hemp on his property at Cinais, southwest of Chinon 
(Indre et Loire), and young Rabelais probably helped 
in its cultivation. Rabelais certainly knew everything 
known then about the character and cultivation of hemp; 
three chapters of his Le Tiers Livre des Faictz ct Dictz 
Heéroiques du Noble Pantagruel (1546) are devoted to 
Uherbe nommée Pantagruehon, which is simply hemp. 
Rabelais here duly mentioned its sexuality : ‘Et, comme 
en plusieurs plantes sont deux sexes, masle et femelle, 
ce que voyons es lauriers, palmes, chesnes, heouses, as- 
phodele, mandragore, fougere, agaric, aristolochie, cy- 
pres, terebynthe, pouliot, peone, et aultres, aussi en ceste 
herbe y a masle qui ne porte fleur auleune, mais abonde en 
semence, et femelle, qui foisonne en petits fleurs blanchas- 
tres, inutiles, et ne porte semence qui vaille, et comme 
est des aultres semblables, ha la feuille plus large, mains 
dure que le masle, et ne croist en pareille haulteur’ (Livre 
3, chap. 49). 
Sir Thomas Urquhart in his 1693 translation came 
closer to the original than he usually did, being swept 
along by his exuberant love of words which Rabelais 
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