460 Linncean Society. 



manufacturing gunpowder ; for there are, it must be known, a great 

 many secret powder-mills, especially in Benoulid, which manufac- 

 ture an inferior sort of powder, sold for about two shillings the 

 pound. 



" After this digression 1 return to the theme I had in view in com- 

 mencing this letter, — to give an account of the useful and cultivated 

 plants of Fezzan. I will begin with the date-palm. All Fezzan and 

 half of Tripolitania live upon it. Here every door, every post is 

 made of date-palm wood ; the ceilings of the rooms are of the stems 

 of that tree, between which are laid the leaves of the palm, instead 

 of the cane used by us. The poorer classes live in huts entirely 

 made of date-palm leaves. Date-palms furnish the most common 

 fuel (the poor people bringing a bundle of it on their backs to this 

 place from a distance of from six to eight miles, for which they get 

 one piastre, i.e. 2d.). Dates are the food of both man and beast; 

 camels, horses, dogs, all eat dates. Even the kernels of this fruit 

 are soaked in water, and after having become soft, are given to the 

 cattle*. 



" On the sheet enclosed I have given figures and descriptions of 

 thirty -eight varieties of the date-palm, from which it will be seen that 

 this tree varies quite as much as our cherries and plums ; in the tree 

 itself, independent of the fruit, I have never been able to find a dif- 

 ference. Of the enormous numbers in which this palm occurs you 

 can hardly form a conception. When Abdel Gelil besieged Soknu 

 (1829), he felled all the date-palms he could, to compel the town to 

 surrender, and his people cut down, during seven days, 43,000 

 trees ; and yet there are still 70,000 to be found. Their produce is 

 comparatively small; — 100 full-grown trees yield about 40 cwts. of 

 dates, worth at this place 30 shillings. In Tripoli the same quan- 

 tity would fetch about four times that sum. The dates, after having 

 been gathered, are dried in the sun, and when quite hard, buried in 

 the sand. They may thus be preserved about two years ; but after 

 the first eighteen months they are attacked by the worms, and in 

 the beginning of the third year nothing is left of them but the ker- 

 nels. As an every-day food dates are considered very heating; and 

 this is the reason why they are not much used on a journey, travellers 

 being obliged to drink too often. They are most wholesome, and 

 taste best, when made into dough with barley. When the heart of 

 the leaves has been cut out, a sweet thickish fluid collects in that 



* There is no grass, nor any other herbage, except a little Sassfah (Me- 

 lilotus), cultivated with almost as much care as the corn, and fetching on 

 that account a good price ; a bundle, about as much as one is able to hold 

 in both hands, is sold for 2 piastres (4 penc?). I was obliged to send my 

 camels about 100 miles to the north, the nearest place where there is suffi- 

 cient pasture for them. Here, about Mourzouk, there is nothing but sand 

 and salt ; the ninety gardens, outside of the town, cover together about a 

 quarter of an English square mile. In the whole town of Mourzouk there 

 are only two cows, one of which belongs to the pasha ; there are no goats ; 

 sheep are brought from Wadi Scherzi, fifty miles distant. When we happen 

 to have milk for our tea or coffee, we consider it a feast. 



