GENERAL REQUIREMENTS. 15 



characters differ considerably in males (see paras. 27 & 29, 

 pages 66 & 67). To distinguish date suckers by their leaves 

 and spines is consequently often a very difficult task. Only 

 people who are very intimately acquainted with the vegetative 

 characters of the date palms of a locality can hope to identify 

 the cultivated varieties by these means, and even they may 

 fail to do so. It can be done, however, as I have been con- 

 nected with cases in which hundreds of suckers, including a 

 number of varieties, have been accidentally mixed, and then 

 separated out with wonderful accuracy as was shown when they 

 bore fruits. 



The lower end of an off-shoot has a mark showing where 

 it has been severed from its parent, while the lower end of a 

 seedling has no such mark normally. Fraudulent people, 

 however, sometimes cut a piece off the lower end of a seedling 

 to make it appear like an off-shoot, but a seedling plant usually 

 has a straight stem, while that of an off-shoot usually has a 

 slight bend at its base where it curved inwards to join the parent 

 stem (see illustration No. 26, page 80a). The direction of the 

 cut with regard to the main axis of the young plant and the 

 angle at which it cuts the sap-conducting vessels of the wood 

 also usually differ in the two cases. In the case of the off-shoot 

 the cub is made approximately in the plane of the main axis of 

 the parent plant and owing to the base of the off-shoot stem 

 bending towards its mother in order to join with her tissues, the 

 cut across the off-shoot at that point will be more or less at 

 right-angles to the direction of its sap-conducting vessels there. 

 In the seedling if the cut is made at right-angles to the direction 

 of the vessels, it will be at right -angles to the main axis of the 

 young plant, there being no bend at the base of its stem ; and if 

 it is cut in a plane anywhere approaching that of the main axis 

 of the young plant, it will not be in the proper direction with 

 regard to the vessels, and the cut end will probably show a more 

 or less distinctive outline. Male off-shoots, female off-shoots 

 from inferior trees, and seedling plants, if skilfully cut, are all 

 extremely difficult to distinguish, however, even by the most 



