CHAPTER V 



PROPAGATION BY SEED 



There is no detail of date growing in which the 

 medieval Arab authors give such play to their 

 imagination as in the handling of seedlings, and this 

 fact strongly indicates that the growth of palms from 

 seed was more a theory than a practice — that seeds 

 were not really planted often enough to check up 

 and explode the fantastic ideas of the writers. In 

 modern literature the seed is absolutely ignored as a 

 means of propagation — such authorities as Faqlr 

 Amin al Madani do not even allude to it, the offshoot 

 being considered the only means of propagating the 

 palm commercially. When a seedling palm is found 

 in an Arab's plantation, one may be sure that it 

 merely grew by accident. 



Ibn Awam* thinks success depends on planting 

 the seed horizontally, not vertically, and covering it 

 with soil mixed with manure and salt. He mentions 

 with evident scepticism the declaration of Ibn Hajjajf 

 that he had grown seeds in soil without salt, and 

 declares that all other authorities unanimously 



*The Book of Agriculture by Shaykh al Fadhl Abu Zaharia 

 Yahid b. Muhammad b. Ahmad Ibn al Aw4m Ashbfli (i. e., a native 

 of Seville, Spain) is one of the fullest and most interesting of medieval 

 treatises on horticultiure. It seems to have been written in the 

 twelfth century, A. D. It was first published in 1802 by the royal 

 library of San Lorenzo del Escorial, Spain, from a MS. in its possession, 

 with a rather loose translation by Don Josef Banqueri, prior of the 

 cathedral of Tortosa; and again at Paris in 1864, from a more perfect 

 MS. in the Bibhotheque Nationale, with a translation by J. J. 

 Clement-Mullet. The first edition is in two vols., the latter in three. 



fAbfi Umar ibn Hajj&j wrote Al Mukna, a treatise on agriculture, 

 in 107S A. D. 



