The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6)

Chapter 413: CHAP. 9. (10.)—THE MODES IN WHICH TREES BEAR.

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The work assembles systematic observations on animals, insects, and trees, combining natural history with practical notes. It surveys insect forms and habits, including bees, silk‑producing worms, spiders, and parasitic species, and discusses reproduction, classification, diseases, and useful products like honey and silk. It then examines animal anatomy in detail, limb by limb and organ by organ, comparing organs, vital functions, and bodily peculiarities across species. Later sections catalogue trees and exotic plants, describing aromatic gums, spices, frankincense, myrrh, and methods for producing and testing unguents and perfumes, and noting their uses and regions of origin.

CHAP. 9. (10.)—THE MODES IN WHICH TREES BEAR.

Having now treated at sufficient length of the requisite conditions of the weather and the soil, we shall proceed to speak of those trees which are the result of the care and inventive skill of man. Indeed, the varieties of them are hardly less numerous than of those which are produced by Nature,2917 so abundantly have we testified our gratitude in return for her numerous bounties. For these trees, we find, are reared either from seed, or else by transplanting, by layers, by slips torn from the stock, by cuttings, by grafting, or by cutting into the trunk of the tree. But as to the story that the leaves of the palm are planted by the Babylonians, and so give birth 2918 to a tree, I am really surprised that Trogus should have ever believed it. Some of the trees are reproduced by several of the methods above enumerated, others, again, by all of them.