with experience, and you must be silent. Experience being the sensible 

 ground for reasoning on phenomena, there is no appeal against it; and 

 however great and numerous the proofs you have to the contrary, the 

 general opinion, resolutely maintained, at length puts you to silence. 

 But the case of the moon, you say, has nothing to do with caprification. 

 But do you believe, that on seeing for the first time the different kinds 

 of receptacles of the caprifig, the insect propagated within them, this 

 same insect afterwards issuing forth and penetrating into the domestic 

 fig, forcing its way from scale to scale of the mouth, in a manner which 

 one would have been at a loss to imagine do you believe, I repeat, that 

 this fact would not suggest to your mind some great design of nature to 

 be fulfilled? And this was observed by the ancient Greeks, a people of 

 lively imagination, who in all natural phenomena, in many plants and 

 flowers, saw secrets, and wonders, and records, and living signs of 

 human affairs. 



It is certain that the practice of caprification came to us from Greece, 

 if we give faith to Pliny, who says that in his time it was in use in the 

 islands of the Archipelago, and entirely unknown to the Italians; but 

 at what precise time it was imported I am unable to say. Writers on 

 rustic affairs in the thirteenth century speak of it as a thing practiced 

 in some places, and they then knew not how it came amongst us. What 

 appears to me to be interesting is, that it was adopted by us precisely 

 as the ancients had it the opinions of our cultivators being the same 

 as those of the Greeks as to its utility. Among country people the 

 most remote traditions are perpetuated without any alteration of conse- 

 quence. We read, for instance, in Dioscorides, that the mandrake has 

 secret virtues, and that it is used by witches. Now, in some parts of our 

 country, where the plant is common, the same opinions are held of it. 

 As I was wandering one day about some fig grounds near Naples, I 

 observed suspended to some fig trees some of those spongy excrescences 

 found on elm trees, and occasioned by some aphis or pulex for the pur- 

 pose of propagating within it. Having asked what was the use of it, I 

 was answered by the cultivator that those spongy excrescences were as 

 good as the caprifig to make figs set in abundance, and that he had been 

 taught the recipe by his father, who had proved it, and his own expe- 

 rience had confirmed the advantage of it. This is, without doubt, an 

 absurdity, yet the same thing may be read in Theophrastus; and after- 

 wards Palladio, in his chapter on the fig, says: "And if there is none 

 of this" (i. 0., of the caprifig), "a branch of wormwood may be sus- 

 pended, or the excrescences which are found among the foliage of the 

 elm." Such is one of the numerous examples of ridiculous and strange 

 practices in use among the lower orders from the remotest periods; 

 however contrary to reason, they remain in vogue, and those who believe 

 in them and practice them allege experience in justification. Certainly, 

 as we have already said, experience is the groundwork of all sound 

 reasoning or phenomena, and we ought on every occasion to follow it; 

 but in speaking of experience, we must know by whom and in what 

 times it was had. 



Returning to caprification, from which we have somewhat diverged, 

 neither its antiquity nor the experience of cultivators are of any account. 

 I do not wish to disparage the labors of so many great men who have 

 written upon it, but I only say they made no experiments; the ancients, 

 like Aristotle and Theophrastus, relating what was the practice, and 

 Cavolini and Gallesio preoccupied with Linnaeus' opinion. 



