Note 81 — Chapter IX · THE WORSHIP OF TREES

Herodotus, i. 193; Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, ii. 8. 4; Pliny, Nat. Hist. xiii. 31, 34 sq. In this passage Pliny states that naturalists distinguished the sexes of all trees and plants. On Assyrian monuments a winged figure is often represented holding an object which looks like a pine-cone to a palm-tree. The scene has been ingeniously and with great probability explained by Professor E. B. Tylor as the artificial fertilisation of the date-palm by means of the male inflorescence. See his paper in Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, xii. (1890) pp. 383-393. On the artificial fertilisation of the date-palm, see C. Ritter, Vergleichende Erdkunde von Arabien (Berlin, 1847), ii. 811, 827 sq.