50 ORIGIN OF THE SEXUAL SYSTEM. 



the account given by Herodotus* of the country about Babylon, 

 where these trees are in plenty, that it was a custom with the 

 natives, in their culture of this plant, to assist the operations of 

 nature, by gathering the flowers of the male trees, and carrying 

 them to the female. By this means they secured the ripening of 

 the fruit, which might else, from unfavourable seasons, or the 

 want of a proper intermixture of the trees of each sex, have been 

 precarious, or at least not to have been expected in equal quan- 

 tities. 



It seems pretty extraordinary, that this discovery should not 

 have led the ancients to detect the whole process of Nature in the 

 propagation of the various species of vegetables ; and yet it does 

 not appear, by any of their writings that are come down to us a 

 that they went farther than this obvious remark upon the palm- 

 tree, and some similar notions concerning the fig. They had 

 indeed, from what they saw in these plants, formed a notion, that 

 all others were male and female likewisef; but this notion was 

 false, the far greater part having bisexual flowers, and serves to 

 convince us, that what they discovered of the palm and fig, was 

 only a right guess, and not founded on any knowledge of the 

 anatomy of flowers, either in those trees, or any others. 



In this dark state the doctrine of the sexes of vegetables re- 

 mained, not only through all the ages of antiquity, but almost to 

 the end of the last century, the moderns seeing no more of this 

 doctrine than the ancients had done before them ; and hence we 

 have to this very hour in use, the false distinctions of male and 

 female species of cornus, pceony, cistus, and many others, which 

 have all bisexual flowers, the distinction in these cases> being 



* Book the first. 



•f Thus Theophrastus says, in his History of Plants t 



** In trees, considered universally, and taking in each several kind, there are, as 

 has been said, many differences. One of these is common to them all, namely, that 

 by which they are distinguished into female and male, of which the one bears fruit, 

 the other not, in some kinds ; in those in which both bear fruit, that of the female 

 Is the best, unless ^these are to be called males, for so they are called by some. 



Hist. PI. Book iii. Chap. IX. 



