BOOK XVI. xLir. 104-xLiv. 107 



fortnight later, and all well within the 8th of July, 

 anticipated by the trade-winds. 



XLIIl. In the case of some trees the fruit does not Daus of 

 follow immediately. The cornel produces its fruit •''^*""^ 

 about midsummer ; it is at first white and afterwards 

 blood-red. The female of the same kind bears its 

 berries after autumn ; tliey are sour and no animal 

 will touch them ; also its wood is spongy and of no 

 use, although the timber of the male tree is one of the 

 strongest and hardest there is, so great is the differ- 

 ence caused by sex in the same kind of tree. The 

 terebinth and also the maple and the ash produce 

 their seed at harvest time, but nut-trees, apples and 

 pears, excepting winter or early varieties, in the 

 autumn, and the acorn-bearing trees still later, at 

 the setting of the Pleiades, the winter oak only in 

 autumn, while some kinds of apple and pear and the 

 cork-tree fruit at the beginning of winter. The 

 fir flowers with a saffron-coloured blossom about 

 midsummer and produces its seed after the setting 

 of the Pleiades ; but the pine and the pitch-pine 

 come before it in budding by about a fortnight, 

 though they themselves also drop their seed after 

 the Pleiades. 



XLIV. Citrus-trees and the juniper and the holm- PemUarities 

 oak are classed as bearing all the year round, and on ^jj'^^^^^' 

 these trees the new crop of fruit hangs along with that 

 of the previous year. The pine, however, is the most 

 remarkable, as it carries both fruit that is beginning 

 to ripen and that which will ripen in the following 

 year and also in the year after next. Also no tree 

 reproduces itself with more eagemess : within a 

 month of a cone being plucked from it another 

 cone is ripening in the same place, an arrangement 



457 



