THE BREADFRUIT TRIBE. 153 



again be prepared to meet with natural wonders. 

 The thick oval green body is a hollow box, or recep- 

 tacle ; within it in darkness and obscurity are reared 

 the flowers, which, like the beggars' children in the 

 caverns among the fortifications of Lille, are so de- 

 formed and pallid as hardly to be recognised. Cut a 

 young fig open ; the whole of its inside is bristling 

 with sterile and fertile flowers, the former having five 

 stamens, and the latter a jagged calyx, with a little 

 white pistil sticking up in the midst of it. This 

 pistil, when ripe, becomes a flat round brown grain, 

 which is lost among the pulp of the fleshy and juicy 

 receptacle, where you eat it, and call it a seed. 



The difiference then between the Nettle and the 

 Fig Tree consists not in the structure of the stem, or 

 of the leaves, or of the calyx, or stamens, or pistils, 

 or fruit properly so called ; but in the hollow fleshy 

 receptacle within which the flowers are forced to pass 

 through their different stages. This kind of differ- 

 ence is, however, of a very unimportant kind ; and 

 not greater than you find between the Strawberry and 

 the Rose, about whose relation to each other every 

 one is agreed. 



For these reasons, both the Fig and the Nettle 

 are by some considered to belong to the same natural 

 order ; there is, however, a difference that I have 

 not mentioned, and which is important ; the juice of 

 the nettle is watery, while that of the Fig is milky ; 

 on which account other Botanists consider the Fig to 

 be the representative of a natural order, distinct from 

 that of the Nettle, but in the closest affinity with it. 



