186 ON THE CAPRIFICATION OF THE FIG. 



life are reproduced by the concurrence of sexes, yet the ancients, 

 although they could not detect either the sexual organs of plants 

 or tiie fact of their fecundation, nevertheless seeing them at 

 certain periods of tjieir life clothed with elegant flowers per- 

 fumed with various essences, distilling delicious nectars, all 

 radiant with glory, as if prepared for some ceremony of pro- 

 portionate importance, they judged by the rules of common sense 

 and analogy that this was the period of their loves, and that 

 there must be amongst them all, according to the laws of nature, 

 a male and a female. Thus with regard to the date-tree, the 

 Babylonians, either imagining or finding by experience that the 

 great distance of the male was often an impediment to the 

 fecundity of the female, they suspended to the latter male flowers 

 brought from a distance ; and they believed that the fertilising 

 power of these male flowers resided in the small flies which they 

 harboured, and which, introducing themselves into the female 

 flowers, caused them to set and to ripen. This operation, called 

 palmijicalion, is still in use, and reckoned necessary for obtain- 

 ing fruit in the countries where the date-tree grows naturally. 

 If we could establish with certainty that this theory of the date- 

 tree was current before the facts were known concerning the fig, 

 we might well suppose that tlie earliest Greek cultivators, seeing 

 the caprifig always sterile (in so far as that the fruit does not 

 become sweet) with a coarse and wild habit, and seeing the 

 quantity of little flies it produces, should have thought that that 

 was indeed the male, and that the fertility of the real fig de- 

 pended upon it, and that thus taking example from the date-tree 

 the custom should have originated of suspending the flowers of 

 the capi'ijjg to the domestic fig-tree. But the memory of this 

 custonr is even more ancient than that of the palmification of the 

 date-tree. This caprijication^ as it is called by us, is spoken of 

 by the most ancient Greek writers on natural history ; it is 

 alluded to by Aristotle, and minutely described by Theoiilirastus, 

 writers who were not only superior to all others in their philo- 

 sophical speculations, but were very ingenious in their ideas on 

 natural objects and phenomena. 



Aristotle observes that a certain insect is generated in the 

 flowers of the caprijig, which having become a fly, enters the 

 unripe fruits of tlie domestic fig and causes them to set, for 

 which reason cultivators always plant the one by the side of the 

 other, or suspend the fruits of the one to the branches of the 

 other. Theophrastus does not confine himself to this bare state- 

 ment of the practice which prevailed, but discourses at length on 

 the manner in which the little fly could produce this effect, 

 whether by opening or by closing the aperture of the fig. He 

 rejects the second theory and pronounces for the first, saying 

 that the fly by continual nibbling enlarges the mouth of the 



