396 GENERAL REVIEW. 



THE FIG AND MULBERRY FAMILY (Moracecz). 



An order of useful fruit-bearing or ornamental plants, natives 

 of temperate and tropical latitudes in both hemispheres, but espe- 

 cially abundant in the tropics, where numerous climbing Figs 

 abound in the forests. The principal genera are : Morus (Mul- 

 berry), Broussonetia (Paper Mulberry), Madura (Osage Orange), 

 Ficus (Figs), and Dorstenia. The plants in this group are 

 monoecious, and remarkable for the flat or fleshy receptacle in 

 which the seeds are immersed. In the case of the common 

 Fig, cross-fertilisation generally so easy in monoecious plants 

 is next to impossible, the male and female flowers being 

 crowded together inside the fleshy fruit. The Mulberry is 

 readily propagated by cuttings of the old wood ; large branches, 

 three or four feet long, root freely if driven into the earth like 

 stakes. M. Baltet recommends grafting or budding on the 

 seedling white Mulberry as a stock, flute-grafting in April or 

 shield-budding in August being most successful.. Budding is 

 most successful in warm soils, and may be performed as early 

 as midsummer. Budding with a pushing eye in April is also 

 recommended by the same author, the scion branches having 

 previously been preserved by burying them in sand behind a 

 north wall. 



Mulberry-trees were introduced into England, early in his 

 reign, by James I., who spent .935 'in planting them near his 

 palace ; and by royal edict, about the year 1605, offered packets 

 of Mulberry-seeds to all who would sow them, for the purpose 

 of encouraging the cultivation of silk-worms for the promotion 

 of silk-manufacture in this country. The royal patronage ren- 

 dered the tree so popular that there is scarcely an old garden 

 or gentleman's seat which existed in the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, in which a Mulberry-tree is not to be found. In 1609, 

 Sieur de la Foret, who had in France a nursery of 500,000 

 plants, travelled over the midland and eastern counties of Eng- 

 land for the sale of Mulberry-trees, and distributed not less 

 than 100,000. 



The Osage Orange (Madura) strikes from cuttings as freely 

 as the Willow ; and M. Neuman observes that new terminal 

 buds are developed from the cambium layer more freely than 

 lateral ones from latent buds on the old stems. Nearly all the 

 Figs root freely from cuttings of the young or hardened wood ; 

 and the common Fig, like the Grape Vine, is easily propagated 

 by burying branches for two or three months, after which they 

 are found to root freely when placed in a genial bottom-heat. 



