CHAPTER I. 



Phoenix has the staminate and carpellary flowers 

 on separate plants. It follows that from a single 

 Date Palm you can obtain no fruit. The Koran 

 speaks of this plant as the only one which is not 

 fertile by itself; but Mohammed is mistaken. A 

 great prophet may be a very poor botanist. There 

 are plenty of dioecious plants ; Bryony, for instance, 

 and Smilax, and the Pistacias and Hemp. I have 

 read of a carpellary palm tree which grew under 

 glass in the Botanic gardens in Paris, but never 

 fruited, as it was the only specimen in Europe. A 

 staminate plant of the same species was brought to 

 Berlin, and the year after that the Paris palm tree 

 bore some fruit. If a flower had been sent by post 

 from Berlin, the thing would be easy to understand ; 

 otherwise I should be inclined to suspect a cross from 

 some allied species growing near. 



The Arabs propagate the Date Palm by shoots 

 from the base of the fruit-bearing trees. A seedling 

 would not flower earlier than ten years old, and, as the 

 half of these young palms would be staminate, the 

 ground would be cumbered during all this time with 

 unprofitable trees. One staminate plant suffices to 

 pollinate some hundreds of the carpellary ones. 

 (Professor Massart, " Voyage au Sahara.") 



Dr. E. B. Tylor, F.K.S., seeks to show in an 

 interesting article, which appeared in the proceedings 

 of the Society of Biblical Archeology, for June, 1890, 

 that the cone- like object in the hand of the winged 

 human figures of the Assyrian sculptures represents, 

 not a pine-cone, but the staminate inflorescence of the 

 Date Palm. The basket or bucket held in the left 

 hand corresponds with the basket carried at present 



