Chap. 12.] 
PROPAGATION BY SUCKEES. 
463 
and he says that they should be steeped for three days in 
diluted manure, or else the day before they are sown in honey 
and water.^^ He says, also, that they should be put in the 
ground with the point downwards, and the sharp edge towards 
the north-east ; and that they should be sown in threes and 
placed triangularly, at the distance of a palm from each other, 
care being taken to water them for ten days, until such time 
as they have germinated. 
Walnuts when sown are placed lengthwise,^^ lyii^g upon 
the sides where the shells are joined; and pine nuts are 
mostly put, in sevens, into perforated pots, or else sown in the 
same way as the berries are in the laurels which are re-produced 
by seed. The citron^^ is propagated from pips as well as layers, 
and the sorb from seed, by sucker, or by slip : the citron, how- 
ever, requires a warm site, the sorb a cold and moist one. 
CHAP. 12. PKOPAGATION BY SUCKEES. 
IN'ature, too,^^ has taught us the art of forming nurseries ; 
when from the roots of many of the trees we see shooting up a 
dense forest of suckers, an offspring that is destined to be 
killed by the mother that has borne them. Tor by the shade 
of the tree these suckers are indiscriminately stifled, as we 
often see the case in the laurel, the pomegranate, the plane, 
the cherry, and the plum. There are some few trees, the elm 
and the palm for instance, in which the branches spare the 
suckers ; however, they never make their appearance in any 
of the trees except those in which the roots, from their fond- 
ness for the sun and rain, keep close, as they range, to the 
surface of the ground. It is usual not to place all these suc- 
kers at once in the ground upon the spot which they are finally 
to occupy, but first to entrust them to the nursery, and to 
allow them to grow in seed-plots, after which they are finally 
transplanted. This transplanting softens down, in a most re- 
markable manner, those trees even which grow wild ; whether 
it is that trees, like men, are naturally fond of novelty and 
23 These precautions are no longer observed at the present day. 
3* This precaution, too, is no longer obseryed. 
^ The citron is produced, at the present day, from either the pips, plants, 
or cuttings. 
3s This passage is borrowed almost verbatim from Yirgil, Georgics ii. 
50, et seq. 
