BOOK XIII. VII. 33-viii. 36 



ate, only attached by a thread at its top end. The 

 flesh takes a year to ripen, though in some places, 

 for instance, Cyprus, it has a pleasant sweet flavour 

 even though it does not reach maturity. In Cyprus 

 the leaf is broader and the fruit rounder than it 

 is elsewhere, though people there do not eat the body 

 of the fruit, but spit it out after merely squeezing out 

 the juice. Also in Arabia the palm is said to have 

 a sickly sweet taste, although Juba states that he 

 prefers the palm that grows in the territory of the 

 Tent-dweller Arabs, which they call the dablas, to 

 all other kinds for flavour. For the rest, it is stated 

 that in a palm-grove of natural growth the female 

 trees do not produce if there are no males, and that 

 each male tree is surrounded by several females with 

 more attractive foliage that bend and bow towards 

 liim ; while the male bristhng with leaves erected 

 impregnates the rest of them by his exhalation and 

 by the mere sight of him, and also by his pollen ; 

 and that when the male tree is felled the females 

 afterwards in their widowhood become barren. And 

 so fully is their sexual union understood that mankind 

 has actually devised a mcthod of impregnating them 

 bv means of the flowcr and down collected from the 

 males, and indeed sometimes by merely sprinkhng 

 their pollen on the females. 



VIII. Palms are also propagated by layering, the Propagatwn 

 trunk for a length of three feet from the actual brain ^^^ingand 

 of the tree being divided by incisions and dug into ^'^'^ , 

 the ground. Also a sHp torn off from the root makes 

 a hardy growth when planted, and so does one from 

 the youngest of the branches. In Assyria the tree 

 itself, too, is laid in a moist soil and throws out roots 

 along its whole length, but these grow into shrubs 



irg 



