t32 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



plants of which he dares to say that they exist in the two sexes, 

 a male that flowers and is fruitless, and a female thit is Powerless 

 but bears fruit ' ; but a special seat of the vegetal soul, or life, 

 evades him even here. That he admits trees into the alUance 

 of the palms on vegetative characters alone, when the fruits are 

 not in the least date-like, is seen in two instances. One such is 

 so described as to have convinced some authorities that what he 

 had in view must have been the cocoa-nut palm of the farther 

 Indies; but it is now no longer doubted that it is the Hyphcene cor- 

 iacea, and not Cocos nucifera. He also knew, and well described the 

 type of the Cycadacese, Cycas circinalis, as a kind of palm. 



Theophrastus, like an ancient Humboldt, or Grisebach, takes 

 pleasure in making comparisons between certain of those trees 

 of arid northern Africa and certain others of southern Europe 

 with which all his readers are well acquainted. There is the persea, 

 as he calls it {Cordia Myxa, Linn.), which in some ways suggests 

 to him the pear tree, a large and very handsome tree, in its mode 

 of branching, its foliage, flower, and fruit externally resembling 

 the pear; but it is evergreen and ripens fruit at all seasons, the 

 fruit however possessing a nut at its core like that of a prune, etc.^ 

 There are other Egyptian trees so unlike any known to his un- 

 travelled countrymen that he can not contrast them with any 

 familiar kinds ; but the competent botanist of to-day will recognize 

 the genera and species of some of them by his descriptions. About 

 Memphis are trees frightfully armed with thorns in every part 

 except the trunk. It^is the arid subtropic region of several gum- 

 bearing acacias and their allies. He attributes to all of them the 

 leguminous fruit, napnoi eWofiog, says the 'pods are gathered 

 and employed as a substitute for galls in tanning leather, and also 

 used medicinally. One kind he calls white thorn {Acacia Senegal, 

 Willd.). To this he attributes flowers beautiful and fragrant, 

 so that they make garlands of them. Another he denominates 

 black thorn {Acacia Arabica, Linn.). Quantities of gum are gath- 

 ered from this kind. It exudes from the trunk where incisions have 

 been made, or even spontaneously without incision of the bark. 

 In the vicinity of Thebes there are extensive forests of these trees, 

 and that far away from the river, where they are never irrigated. 

 Such pen pictures of foreign dendrologic scenes are not rare in 

 Theophrastus; and they are always so vividly drawn that the 

 reader inevitably thinks of him as writing from the very midst 



' Hist., Book i, ch. 22; also Book ii, ch.' 8. 

 ' Ibid., iv, ch. 2. 



