2Q8 SEXUALITY OF VEGETABLES. CHAP. VI. 



Empcdo- alky originated. But its antiquity is unquestion- 

 ably great ; as it appears to have been entertained 

 even among the original Greeks, from the antiquity 

 of their mode of cultivating Figs ; and to have been 

 made the subject of the speculations of some of 

 their earliest philosophers, from the fact of its having 

 been a doctrine taught by Empedocles, that the 

 sexes are united in plants ; a doctrine involved 

 indeed in that of Anaxagoras by which the desires 

 and passions of animals are attributed to vegeta- 

 Herodo- bles.* It was evidently a prevalent notion through- 

 out Greece, and the nations to the east of Greece, 

 in the time of Herodotus, who recognises it in his 

 account of the cultivation of the PhcenLr dacty- 

 lifera or Babylonian Palm ; which he represents as 

 being cultivated in the country around Babylon in 

 the manner of Figs, the cultivator taking the 

 flower of that Palm which the Greeks call the male 

 Palm, and binding it around the flowers of the 

 fruit-bearing Palm, that the fruit may not fall im- 

 mature.-^ Whether the beneficial effect resulting 

 from this practice was produced by the agency of 

 insects, generated in the male plant, as Herodotus 

 asserts, it is not our object at present to inquire. 

 It is enough to have ascertained that the notion of 



* Arist. Hspi <PVTCDV. TO. A. 



f Tows tpoivixs; GUK&UV rponov btpomtvwcri r, rt AA, KM tpowlxuv, 

 ?vXrjv xotoEOMft, TOVTOV vov xapnov Tre 

 TWV foivixuv, wa. nsTrdivy TE <r<pi o4/riv TW 

 v, Kcti jw,rj 7roppe 6 xa^Troj o rou <poiv/xoj. Herodot. Porsoni 

 Clio, 193. 



