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California conditions with regard to the fig crop down to the present 
season: 
Asa commercial factor the fig has been of little importance among California 
fruits, although it has been an incumbent of almost every rancher’s door-yard 
since the Padres taught their Indian peons horticulture. As a fresh fruit it is 
luscious and invaluable for its medicinal qualities. Eaten with sugar and cream, it 
is as grateful for desert as the strawberry, and more wholesome; but it is good only 
when perfectly ripe. It will not bear transportation under existing conditions, 
and the fresh figs offered in Eastern markets are a delusion and asnare. As a dried 
fruit it has also been a failure in the market. Quantities of dried figs are sold in 
California, although they are usually small and shriveled in appearance and lack 
the rich aromatic nutty flavor of the imported fig. The latter commands in Cali- 
fornia, as everywhere, a high price, usually 25 cents per pound. The home product 
sells for 10 cents. It has been the dream of fig culturists for years so to improve 
the quality that the California fruit may compete with the imported. To this end 
soils, climates, and varieties have been patiently studied. 
What this says for California may also be said regarding our South- 
ern States, except that the energetic attempts of Californians to 
improve the output have not been elsewhere emulated. It is now a 
generally accepted fact that the Smyrna fig, the fig of commerce, owes 
its peculiar flavor to the number of ripe seeds which it contains, and 
since the days of Pliny and Plutarch it has been known that in Ori- 
ental regions it has been the custom of the natives to break off branches 
of the wild or caprifig, bring them to the edible fig, and tie them to its 
limbs. From the caprifigs thus brought in there issues a minute insect 
which crawls into the flowers of the edible fig and fertilizes them, thus 
producing a crop of seeds and bringing about the subsequent ripening 
of the fruit. The careful investigations of Count Solms-Laubach and 
Fritz Muller in the early eighties, and later those of Dr. Paul Mayr 
have shown that the varieties of the wild or caprifig are the only ones 
which contain male organs, while the varieties of the Smyrna fig are 
exclusively female. In the caprifig there exists three crops of fruit, 
the first known as “ profichi,” the second as ‘‘ mammoni,” and the third 
as ‘“‘mamme,” the latter remaining upon the trees through the winter. 
The fig insects (the Oriental species being known as blastophaga gros- 
sorum Gravenhorst) over-winter in the mamme, oviposit in the profichi, 
develop a generation within it, each individual living in the swelling of 
a gall flower (a modified and infertile female flower), and issue from it 
covered with pollen, from which they make vain efforts to relieve them- 
selves, enter the young flower receptacles of the Smyrna fig, which are 
at that time of the proper size, and make an attempt to oviposit in the 
true female flowers, fertilizing them at the same time by means of the 
pollen adhering to their bodies, and thus bringing about an extensive 
production of seed. The life history of the insect from that time on is 
not well understood. Even Paul Mayr has failed to discover what has 
become of the Blastophaga during the generation of the second crop 
of caprifigs known as mammoni. In the development of the third or 
over-wintering crop, however, the Blastophaga is again present and is 
