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 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.