WHAT IS THE DATE PALM? 15 



b'eing no secondary increase in diameter with increasing age such as 

 occurs in ordinary fruit and forest trees. In consequence, the age of 

 a palm tree can be roughly estimated from its height, but never from 

 the diameter, nor, as is customary among woodsmen, by counting the 

 rings of annual growth, for the simple reason that the date palm has 

 no such rings. 



The leaves of the date palm (frontispiece and fig. 1, p. 16) are 

 feather shaped and very large, frequently from 12 to 18 feet long. 

 The ancient Egyptians had a tradition, held also by some tribes of 

 modern Arabs, that the date palm produces twelve leaves in a year. 

 It is an interesting fact that the Egyptian hieroglyphic which signified 

 a month represented a single leaf of the date palm, and the sign for a 

 year pictured a crown of leaves of the date palm. a Of course, there is 

 no such fixed interval of time between the unfolding of successive 

 leaves, but it is true that the date palm usually produces from twelve 

 to twenty leaves in a year. 



These leaves remain alive and green for several years, but finally 

 lose their color and bend downward toward the trunk. (See the lower 

 leaves on the tall palm in PL XIX, fig. 2.) Travelers who have 

 seen date palms growing remote from human habitations in the Sahara 

 Desert report that in such situations the old leaves remain attached to 

 the trunk permanently, the palm being crowned with living green 

 leaves and the trunk clothed to the ground by the reflexed dead leaves. 

 Furthermore, in such conditions, where the date palm is left to grow 

 uncontrolled by man, the offshoots produced by the young palms grow 

 unhindered and often rival in size the parent trunk, and they in turn 

 give rise to other offshoots, even after the parent stem has passed 

 the age when it would produce offshoots. The result of this is that 

 instead of a single palm tree, the traveler sees a great thicket com- 

 posed of a few tall trunks (the original palm and the oldest offshoots), 

 surrounded at the base by a tangled mass of younger offshoots, strug- 

 gling upward and outward. Such a clump is shown in Yearbook, 1900 

 (PL LIX, fig. 4). All of these trunks retain their dead leaves per- 

 manently, so that such a clump of palm shoots is well nigh impen- 

 etrable. To those who have traveled in countries where the date 

 palm is the commonest cultivated tree, the description given above 

 will seem very strange. In all such countries the date palm is well 

 cared for and the dead leaves removed, leaving a clean trunk, crowned 

 with a tuft of living leaves. (See frontispiece and Yearbook, 1900, 

 PL LX.) Besides this, the Arab cultivators are careful to remove the 

 offshoots as soon as they are large enough to plant, or to destroy them 

 when young in case they do not desire to propagate the variety. Such 



Fischer, Th. Die Dattelpalme, Erganzungsheft No. 64. In Petermann's Mit- 

 theilungen. Gotha, 1881, p. 4. 



