VOL XLVII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 177 



you; and, if you think, proper, be pleased to communicate it to the Royal 

 Society." 



In pursuance of his correspondent's desire, Mr. Watson lays this account be- 

 fore the Royal Society, which he thinks very curious ; not on account of its no- 

 velty, or of its confirming the sex of plants, which is now sufficiently esta- 

 blished; but on account of the male and female palm-tree's flourishing so com- 

 pletely in such high latitudes as those of Leipsic and Berlin. 



The impregnation of the female palm tree by the male has been known in the 

 most ancient times. Herodotus, when speaking of the palm tree, says, " that 

 the Greeks call some of these trees male, the fruit of which they bind to the 

 other kind, which bears dates: that the small flies, with which the male abounds, 

 may assist in ripening the fruit; for, says this author, the male palm tree pro- 

 duces in its fruit small flies, just as the fig tree does." The very remote age, in 

 which Herodotus wrote, sufficiently apologizes for his believing, that what was 

 really brought about by the farina foecundans of the male flower, was to be attri- 

 buted to the insects frequently found in it, and which perhaps very often do carry 

 this farina from the male to the female. They had seen the effects of caprifica- 

 tion in fig trees by these insects, and were misled by the analogy. They are here 

 translated small flies ; but they had a particular appellation given them by Hero- 

 dotus, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, who call them 4"ii'- Pliny, in his history, 

 when treating of caprification, which is almost a translation from Theophrastus, 

 calls them culices, Linneus ichneumones, and Tournefort moucherons. Theo- 

 phrastus, in his account of the palm tree, gives the very process mentioned by 

 our correspondent. " They bring together, says he, the males and the females, 

 which causes the fruit to continue and ripen on the trees. Some, from the simi- 

 litude of this to what happens in fig trees, call it caprification; and it is per- 

 formed in the following manner: while the male plant is in flower, they cut off 

 a branch of these flowers, and scatter the dust and down in it on the flowers of 

 the female plant. By these means the female does not cast her fruit, but pre- 

 serves them to maturity." Pliny also mentions the like process. Among more 

 modern authors, Prosper Alpinus, gives at large the manner of the impregnation 

 of the female palm tree by the male, for the purposes before-mentioned. We 

 have also copious accounts of the same process by Tournefort, Kaempfer, and 

 Ludwig. As Kaempfer was an eye-witness, his account of this matter is most 

 to be depended on. 



Mr. W. observes, that though the ancients distinguished rightly, in deter- 

 mining the true sexes of the palm tree, it is the only plant in which they have 

 not erred. Though they called plants of the same genus, or of others very 

 nearly related to it, male and female, it was on an imaginary, a false principle: and 

 that usually taken from their size, the difference of their leaves, or the figure of 



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