240 OUE, COMMON rKTJITS. 



successive harvests are not unfrequently obtained. A 

 warm climate, however, does not seem to be sufficient of 

 itself to bring the fruit to perfection, for in China, where 

 it is called " the flowerless fruit," it seems to be held in 

 very little estimation ; a Chinese treatise on husbandry, 

 after stating that " it grows in the hills and wilds, and at 

 present is also planted in gardens," only adding, with re- 

 gard to its qualities, that " it may be gathered and eaten." 

 Sir J. F. Davis, too, says respecting it that " from my own 

 experience the native fig of China is very poor, and hardly 

 advanced beyond the wild state. It would be a real bene- 

 fit to send some of our European figs to Hong Kong." 



Not very many kinds of figs are found in this country, 

 where the climate does not allow of its being generally 

 naturalized, but the varieties of the common fig in some 

 parts of the world are almost innumerable, though man 

 has done little towards producing them, the flowers being 

 too difficult of access to permit of much experimentalizing 

 upon them ; yet a botanist, who undertook to catalogue 

 merely those growing in the south of France, found them 

 to amount to several hundreds ; and Bosc observed, too, 

 that all he met with in America differed from any he had 

 known in France. The prison-like enclosure in which the 

 blossom is confined, tends also to the exclusion of the 

 influences it most needs, a circumstance which has given 

 rise to a singular method, followed from very ancient 

 times, of promoting fig-ripening by a process partly na- 

 tural and partly artificial called caprification, thus de- 

 scribed by Pliny : The wild fig, which bears a small dis- 

 agreeably tasting fruit, nourishes a sort of gnat, one of the 

 Hymenoptera, and when this wild fruit begins to decay, 

 the insect generated within it wings its flight to the 

 kindred cultivated kind, and, beginning to feed on them, 

 makes apertures, through which air and sunshine penetrate 

 also, and thus the fig is speedily ripened. Branches of 

 the wild fig were, therefore, sometimes brought from a 

 distance and tied upon the cultivated trees, but more 

 usually a single wild tree was planted among the others 

 to windward of them, so that the breeze might readily 

 bear the insect guests to their banquet. He adds, that on 



