PKODUCED BY MAN. 829 



which I find in Herodotus, though other writers have not quoted 

 him ad hoc, that it is not unreasonable to suggest yet another site 

 for the one where man first intermeddled with the self-preservation 

 and the species-preservation of the date-palm ^ 



Kaempfer, from whose opinion I dissent with the greatest 

 reluctance when I consider the thoroughness with which that 

 model traveller availed himself of his opportunities, and the abund- 

 ance of those opportunities themselves, gives us his views as to the 

 place in which the palm in question was first cultivated by man, in 

 the following words (p. 714) of his ^Amoenitates Exoticae,' Fascic. 

 iv. 3, published in 17 14: ' Ejus patria in Asia quidem, nam Africam 

 non moramur.' 



Ritter (^Erdkunde,' Theil xiii. p. 771 seqq.) considerably narrows 

 this area by selecting the Babylonian Nabataeans in the valley of 

 the Tigris and Euphrates as having been the people who dis- 

 covered and first practised the art of improving the date-palm. 

 But Professor Eawlinson, in a letter to me, gives 'b. c. 1500, or 

 even earlier ' as the possible date of a probably early Babylonian 

 cylinder figured with palms in his ' Ancient Monarchies,' iii. p. 23, 

 2nd ed., and ^b. c. 883' as the earliest date for Assyrian figures 

 representing palms ; whilst the Egyptian Twelfth Dynasty, which 

 possessed the tree, carries us back to from i860 B.C. to 2200 B.C., 

 according to Wilkinson and Brugsch respectively. 



* It is a little amusing to find twenty two pages, 289-311, of Seemann's 'Popular 

 History of Palms ' devoted to discussing the questions whether the date-palm was an 

 * endemic (genuine) member of the Canarian Flora,' and ' whether it was indigenous 

 to the Canary Islands.' This book was, however, published in 1856, and though 

 something, and perhaps too much, was even then ascribed to * occasional causes ' in 

 the explaining of anomalies in geographical distribution, a good deal has been learnt 

 since that time which would have rendered that dozen of pages impossible. It is re- 

 markable that the author did not use the arguments supplied him by Dr. Carl Bolle in 

 support of the Atlantic hypothesis, which since those days has been buried as deeply 

 as the Atlantic itself was supposed to have been. Of course another question, not 

 raised iudeed by Dr. Seemann, as to whether the art of artificially cultivating the date 

 could have originated in what we now know to be oceanic islands and spread thence 

 eastward is, by the knowledge we have since 1859 gained as to ' Man and Nature ' in 

 their independent as well as in their mutually interacting operations, rendered all 

 but an impertinence. We (see Darwin, * Animals and Plants under Domestication,* 

 i. p. 328, 2nd ed.) 'do not believe that any edible or valuable plant except the 

 Canary grass has been derived from an oceanic or uninhabited island.' It is only just 

 not an impossibility that the date-palm should have been so derived ; if it had 

 been, this would indeed have been something more surprising than all the usefuliiesa 

 of the tree, than all its beauty, and even than all the blunders which have been made 

 about it. 



