LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY —GREENE 13I 



to infer that the whole North has no other silva than that thus 

 indicated. He has not been able to learn that it has kinds of 

 trees peculiarly its own. ^ Southward, however, across the Mediter- 

 ranean, and away up the Nile, are very different kinds of trees; 

 many that can not be successfully transplanted from that dry 

 and heated climate into regions where there are rains and cold 

 weather at the winter season. There, in some localities where it 

 never rains, the palms attain their greatest dimensions and their 

 best quality of fruit; not, however as indicating that they have no 

 need of moisture. On the contrary, wherever a grove of wild 

 palms occurs water is sure to be found at no great distance below 

 the surface of the ground, though it is usually subsaline, a circum- 

 stance which, he says, has taught the cultivators to use a little 

 salt with advantage in growing dates in other than their native 

 soil. 2 In Phoenicia and in Syria there are various kinds of palm; 

 because these like other trees differ according to differences of 

 region and climate as well as according to the culture given them. 

 The palms as a group interest hiin deeply ; they are in many ways 

 so very unlike other trees, in their best known type bearing every 

 thing — leaves, flowers, fruits — in a single terminal tuft, the cau- 

 dex being without a branch. Now, with Aristotle, father of 

 biologic investigation, and with those of. his school, there was 

 much and serious inquiry into the question of a soul, and some 

 particular seat of life in plants. The latter was hard to locate; 

 so many are the trees which, as susceptible of propagation by mere 

 cuttings, thereby proclaim it that their seat of life is everywhere, 

 so to speak. But these palms were different. Cut off the leafy and 

 fructiferous summit of the tree and the whole is killed, just as one 

 kills an animal by decapitation.^ He was near thinking that in 

 this kind of tree that one terminal part is the seat of life; but he 

 knows of a smaller palm, native to the islands of Sicily and Crete 

 {ChamcErops humilis), which, if the top be removed, or if even 

 the whole tree be cut down to the ground, renews itself by shoots 

 from the root. He has grown from seed the few kinds of palms 

 available at Athens, knows all about their germination and early 

 stages of development; finds no distinction of bark, wood, and pith 

 in the structure of their trunks;* recognizes in them the only 



> Hist., Book i, ch. 6. 



2 Ibid., li, ch. 8. 



3 Theophrastus had heard that at Babylon there were palms of some sort 

 the top of which could be made to root and grow again. Hist., Book ii, ch. 2 . 



* Ibid., i, ch. 9. 



