THE WILD PATE PALM OF INDIA. 



251 



or thatch for houses. The sugar-yielding variety, Phoenix sylvestris, 

 is known as the wild date of Bengal. Phoenix dactylifera is the name 

 given to the true date palm of Arabia and Africa ; but as it appears 

 to be undistinguishable from the Bengal variety, except in size and 

 vigour of growth, there seems little doubt that any apparent difference 

 is due only to superior cultivation and variety of climate or soil, and to 

 its being always a cultivated tree in Bengal ; the specific name sylvestris 

 may have been originally given, owing to its inferiority in size to the 

 African or Arabian tree, with which European botanists were more 

 early familiar. 



The date palm, when not stunted in its growth by extraction of its 

 juice for sugar, is a very handsome tree, rising in Bengal to from thirty 

 to forty feet in height, with a dense crown of leaves spreading in a 

 hemispherical form from its summit. These leaves are from ten to 

 fifteen feet long, and composed of numerous leaflets or pinnules about 

 eighteen inches long. The trunk is rough, from the adherence of the 

 bases of the falling leaves, which serves to distinguish it at a glance 

 from the smooth-trunked cocoanut palm, which in its leaves only it. 

 resembles. Like all of the Phoenix genus the trees are dioecious, and 

 the fruit hangs in dense bunches from the centre of the crown of the 

 female tree ; it flowers about April or May, and the fruit ripens in 

 July or August ; the latter is, however, of a very inferior description 

 in Bengal, and is seldom gathered except for seed, from which the 

 young trees are raised. The fruit, indeed, consists more of seed than 

 of pulp, and altogether is only about one-fourth the size of the Arabian 

 kind brought annually to Calcutta for sale, and, when fresh imported, a 

 rich and favourite fruit there. This inferiority of the Bengal fruit may 

 no doubt be attributed to the entire neglect of its improvement there 

 from time immemorial, and, perhaps, in some measure to the practice 

 of tapping the trees for their sap, so universally followed in the 

 districts around Calcutta, its principal range of growth. 



The date tree is met with in almost every part of Bengal Proper, 

 but it flourishes most congenially, and is found plentifully only in 

 the alluvial soils which cover its south-eastern portion, excepting 

 only such tracts as suffer entire submersion annually from the over- 

 flow of the rivers, as is common in portions of the Dacca, Mymunsing, 

 and Sunderbund districts. The extent of country best suited for its 

 growth, and over which it is found most plentifully as above indicated, 

 may therefore be taken as within an area stretching east and west 

 about 200 miles, and north and south about 100 miles, and compre- 

 hending by a rough estimate about 9000 square miles — within an 

 irregular triangular space. 



The practice of extracting its juice, however, for the production of 

 sugar, extends at present over a much smaller area, probably not 

 more than two-thirds of the above-described space ; and if we con- 

 sider further, how small a portion of these favourite date districts are 

 as yet occupied by date tree cultivation, the room for its future 

 extension, even if confined to these tracts alone, appears a wide one 

 indeed. If we trace an irregular parallelogram, stretching eastward 

 from Kishengunge, in the Nuddea district, to Backergunge, and from 

 Mahduppore, in Furrcedpore district southward to the borders of the 



