1820.] Royal Academy of Sciences. 4o5 



Barbary and Egypt, and is also cultivated with advantage in 

 several of the southern countries of Europe. M . DeUsle, who 

 carefully observed the cultivation of it, while he was attached to 

 the expedition to Egypt, described it very fully in a memoir 

 which he presented to the Academy. This tree is cultivated 

 from seeds, from suckers, and even from slips. The mode of 

 treatment of the slip, which consists in replanting the top after 

 having separated it from its trunk, had been already mentioned 

 by Theophrastus and by Pliny ; and M. Delisle was assured by 

 the Arabs that it is still practised. It is well known that the 

 date tree has the sexes separately on different plants ; the suckers 

 of each tree producing plants of the same sex. The inhabitants, 

 in order to gain as much profit as possible from their land, take 

 care to plant no more than the small number of males which are 

 requisite for the artificial fecundation of the females, and if, 

 from any cause, the catkins of these male date trees should not 

 be placed at a proper time in a situation to throw their fertilizing 

 farina on the female flowers, the fruit will not ripen, and the crop 

 is lost. 



A species of palm much less known than the date is that of 

 the nipa, which grows spontaneously in the Indian Archi- 

 pelago, on the sea coast. Rumphius and Thunberg have given 

 imperfect descriptions of it ; the young kernels of it are eaten 

 when preserved. Its catkins cut before it is fully expanded 

 produces a sweet liquor, which, by fermentation, become spiri- 

 tuous and pleasant to drink. Baskets, mats, and other trifling 

 articles, are made of the leaves. 



M. Houton Labillardiere observed, and carefully describes, the 

 fructification of it ; and has in several instances rectified the 

 opinions hitherto entertained of it. The female flower has three 

 stigmas, and the young fruit three ovales ; the embryo is placed 

 at the foot of the seed. In respect to its male catkins, with 

 sessile flowers, its antherae borne on a single filament, which is 

 not ramified ; its female flowers without a calyx, and its aggre- 

 gate fruits, it strikingly resembles the pandanus ; butitsspathae,the 

 calyx of the male flowers in six divisions, and the fan-like form 

 of the leaves, produce a still nearer degree of affinity to the true 

 palm trees. 



The ancients make frequent mention of an Egyptian tree to 

 which they give the name of Persea ; it resembled a pear tree, 

 but its leaves lasted during the whole year ; its stone fruit was 

 very sweet and w^holesome, and the wood, which was black and 

 hard, was extremely valuable. In the Arabian writers of the 

 middle ages, we may still find descriptions of a tree which they 

 call feback, and which offers all the characters attributed by the 

 ancients to their /)e?sea, but this tree has latterly become so rare, 

 at least in Lower Egypt, that botanists have not been able to fix 

 upon it with certainty : some of them, as Clusius, and Linnaeus 



