290 Fruits and Fruit-Trees. 



used in Palm-Sunday ceremonials, though deprived of 

 their natural form by being tied up into wisps. The 

 date-palm is emphatically the tree of the desert, writing, 

 moreover, upon the far horizon, for the traveller across 

 the flat and weary sand, that near it are *' wells of water," 

 since no tree, not even the willow, is fonder of water or 

 more dependent upon it for prosperity. The Arabs say 

 that for the palm to flourish its feet must be in the water 

 and its head in the fire. The date is the palm, universally 

 and exclusively, of Scripture ; the palm of legend, song, 

 fable, and tradition; the palm that art has delighted 

 to honour ; the palm that has fixed itself metaphorically 

 in language. Let us not forget, either, that it is the tree 

 of Palmyra, that wonderful city in the wilderness, the 

 cherished of Solomon, the home and capital, in a later 

 age, of proud, chaste, literary Zenobia, " Queen of the 

 East," which has for ages existed only as a skeleton, yet 

 in its enormous ruin is so magnificent, sorrowful, and 

 romantic, as to constitute the finest sepulchre of human 

 labour in the world. 



The flowers of the date-palm, like those of the coco, 

 are individually insignificant, but produced in vast 

 numbers, lying at first in a great sheath or "spathe." 

 The clusters are developed, again like those of the 

 coco, from among the bases of the leaf-stalks, hang- 

 ing down when ripe, something like huge bunches of 

 grapes. They are cut when near maturity, and laid in the 

 sunshine to get dry. Fifty full-grown trees yield about 

 a ton of good and eatable fruit. The best of the dates 



