478 
PLINY'S NATURAL HISTORY. 
[Book XYII. 
by chance, another great instructor, and one from whom, per- 
haps, we have learnt a still greater number of lessons. A 
careful husbandman, being desirous, for its better protection, 
to surround his cottage with a palisade, thrust the stakes 
into growing ivy, in order to prevent them from rotting. 
Seized hy the tenacious grasp of the still living ivy, the stakes 
borrowed life from the life of another wood, and it was found 
that the stock of a tree acted in place of earth. 
Por this method of grafting the surface is made level with a 
saw, and the stock carefully smoothed with the pruning-knife. 
This done, there are two modes of proceeding, the first of 
which consists in grafting between the bark and the wood. 
The ancients were fearful at first of cutting into the wood, but 
afterwards they ventured to pierce it to the very middle, and 
inserted the graft in the pith, taking care to enclose but one, 
because the pith, they thought, was unable to receive more. An 
improved method has, however, in more recent times, allowed 
of as many as six grafts being inserted, it being considered 
desirable by additional numbers to make a provision for the 
contingency of some of them not surviving. With this view, 
an incision is carefully made in the middle of the stock, a thin 
Avedge being inserted to preveuo the sides from closing, until 
the graft, the end of which is first cut to a point, has been let 
into the fissure. In doing this many precautions are neces- 
sary, and more particularly every care should be taken that 
the stock is that of a tree suitable for the purpose, and that 
the graft is taken from one that is proper for grafting. The 
sap,^^ too, is variously distributed in the several trees, and does 
not occupy the same place in all. In the vine and the fig^^ the 
middle of the tree is the driest, and it is in the summit that 
the generative power resides ; hence it is, that from the top 
the grafts are selected. In the olive, again, the sap lies in the 
This story is borrowed fi'om Theoplirastus, De Caus. B. ii. c. 19. 
Fee remarks, that it is very doubtful if an operation of so coarse a nature 
could be productive of such'results ; and lie says, tliat, at all events, the two 
woods must have been species of the same genus, or else individuals of the 
same fomily. The mode of grafting here described is called by agricul- 
turists in foreign countries, *' Pliny's graft." 
11 These statements as to the locality of the sap are erroneous. 
12 The fig is the only fruit that is not improved by grafting ; but then 
it is not similar to most fruit, being, as Fee says, nothing more than a 
fleshy floral receptacle. 
