[Footnote 2: Signor Della Cella 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 the rest is (he tells us) neglected and uncultivated. 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.] [Footnote 3: The following is the process mentioned by Shaw.—“In the months of March or April, when the sheaths that respectively enclose the young clusters of the male flowers and the female fruit begin to open (at which time the latter are formed and the first are mealy), they take a sprig or two of the male cluster, and insert it into the sheath of the female; or else they take a whole cluster of the male tree, and sprinkle the meal, or farina of it over several clusters of the female.” (Travels in Barbary, vol. i., p. 259-60). The same author remarks that the palm-tree arrives at its greatest vigour about thirty years after transplantation, and continues so seventy years afterwards; bearing yearly fifteen or twenty clusters of dates, each of them weighing fifteen or twenty pounds[a]. “Si parmi les palmiers (says the author of a treatise on agriculture quoted by Kazwini, in the words of Silvestre de Sacy), “Si parmi les palmiers on rapproche les individus mâles des individus femelles, ces derniers portent des fruits en plus grande abondance, parceque le voisinage favorise leurs amours; et si, au contraire, on éloigne l’arbre femelle des mâles, cette distance empêche qui’il ne rapporte aucun fruit. Quand on plante un palmier mâle au milieu des femelles, et que, le vent venant à souffler, les femelles reçoivent l’odeur des fleurs du mâle, cette odeur suffit pour rendre féconds tous les palmiers femelles qui environnent le mâle.”] [Footnote a: Shaw has observed that “the method of raising the Phœnix (φοινιξ) or palm, and, what may be further observed, that when the old trunk dies, there is never wanting one or other of those offsprings to succeed it, may have given occasion to the fable of the bird of that name dying and another arising from it.” (So Pliny, lib. xiii. c. 4.) Mirumque de ea accepimus cum phœnice ave quæ putatur ex hujus palmæ argumento nomen accepisse, emori ac renasci ex seipsa.] [Footnote 4: The palm-tree, however, though a beautiful tree, is sometimes, it appears, a very obstinate one; and the means which we are told, on Arab authority, should be used to render it more docile on these occasions would astonish the horticulturists of Europe.