THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIFE OF OTHERS 311 



certain flies possessed of a " vivific virtue," which 

 somehow lent an exuberant fertility to the dates. 

 But the true rationale of the incantation is now 

 explained. Palm trees, like human beings, are male 

 and female. The garden plants, the date bearers, 

 were females ; the desert plants were males ; and 

 the waving of the branches over the females meant 

 the transference of the fertilizing pollen dust from 

 the one to the other. 



Now consider, in this far away province of the 

 vegetable kingdom, the strangeness of this pheno- 

 menon. Here are two trees living wholly different 

 lives, they are separated by miles of desert sand ; 

 they are unconscious of one another's existence ; 

 and yet they are so linked together that their 

 separation into two is a mere illusion. Physiologi- 

 cally they are one tree; they cannot dwell apart. 

 It is nothing to the point that they are neither 

 dowered with locomotion nor the power of conscious 

 choice. The point is that there is that in Nature 

 which unites these seemingly disunited things, 

 which effects combinations and co-operations where 

 one would least believe them possible, which 

 sustains by arrangements of the most elaborate 

 kind inter-relations between tree and tree. By a 

 device the most subtle of all that guard the 

 higher Evolution of the world — the device of Sex 



