340 
BENGAZL, 
change in the soil itself, that it does not afford the same variety as 
formerly *. 
The fruit of the palm-tree forms too essential a part of Arab food 
to allow of the necessary precautions being neglected for insuring 
the growth and the ripening of dates ; but the fig-trees are for the 
most part wild, and produce only, a diminutive fruit, which never 
comes to any perfection. It is a well-known fact in natural history, 
that “ these trees are male and female, and that the fruit will be dry 
and insipid without a previous communication with the male.” 
This pecuharity was discovered at a very early period, and has been 
noticed by writers of various ages with much perspicuity and detail. 
There appears to have been but little variation at any time in the 
mode of performing these operations ; and the manner in which the 
palm-tree is described, by Pliny, to have been impregnated, is the 
same with that which prevails in the present day. 
A part of the blossom from the male tree is either attached to the 
fruit of the female ; or the powder from the blossoms of the male is 
shaken over those which the female produces. The first of these 
methods is practised in Barbary, (one male being sufficient, as Shaw 
has observed, to impregnate four or five hundred female) ; and the 
latter is common in Egypt, where the number of male trees is 
* Signor Della Celia has remarked (p. 185,) that there are a few palm-trees in the 
neighbourhood of Bengazi, and a tract or two of land sowed with barley (“alcune palme, 
e qualche tratto seminato col orzo” — ) all tlie rest is (he tells us) neglected and unculti- 
vated. But there are a great many palm-trees in the neighbourhood of Bengazi, on both 
sides of the harbour, and a great proportion of cultivated land. 
