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 peculiarity 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 greater[3]. Both these methods are described by Pliny, (Hist. Nat. lib. xiii.) and the whole account which is there given of the palm-tree and its several varieties is extremely accurate and interesting. The attachment of this tree to a sandy and nitrous soil, and its partiality at the same time for water; its inability to thrive in any other than a dry and hot climate, its peculiar foliage and bark, and the decided distinction of sex which is observable in it, are all mentioned in detail by the Roman naturalist. The remarks of Arab writers on the distinction of sex in the palm-tree are nearly the same with those of Pliny; and a most extraordinary confirmation of it will be found in a Persian anecdote quoted by Silvestre de Sacy; from which it will clearly appear that an unrequited and secret attachment to a neighbouring date-tree had nearly caused the death of a too-susceptible female palm!