The history of the fig presents a close analogy with that of the olive in point of origin and geographical limits. Its area as a wild species may have been extended by the dispersal of the seeds as cultivation spread. This seems probable, as the seeds pass intact through the digestive organs of men and animals. However, countries may be cited where the fig has been cultivated for a century at least, and where no such naturalization has taken place. I am not speaking of Europe north of the Alps, where the tree demands particular care and the fruit ripens with difficulty, even the first crop, but of India for instance, the Southern States of America, Mauritius, and Chili, where, to judge from the silence of compilers of floras, the instances of quasi-wildness are rare. In our own day the fig tree grows wild, or nearly wild, over a vast region of which Syria is about the centre; that is to say, from the east of Persia, or even from Afghanistan, across the whole of the Mediterranean region as far as the Canaries.[1476] From north to south this zone varies in width from the 25th to the 40th or 42nd parallel, according to local circumstances. As a rule, the fig stops like the olive at the foot of the Caucasus and the mountains of Europe which limit the Mediterranean basin, but it grows nearly wild on the south-west coast of France, where the winter is very mild.[1477]
We turn to historical and philological records to see whether the area was more limited in antiquity. The ancient Egyptians called the fig teb,[1478] and the earliest Hebrew books speak of the fig, whether wild or cultivated, under the name teenah,[1479] which leaves its trace in the Arabic tin.[1480] The Persian name is quite different, unjir; but I do not know if it dates from the Zend. Piddington’s Index has a Sanskrit name, udumvara, which Roxburgh, who is very careful in such matters, does not give, and which has left no trace in modern Indian languages, to judge from four names quoted by authors. The antiquity of its existence east of Persia appears to me doubtful, until the Sanskrit name is verified. The Chinese received the fig tree from Persia, but only in the eighth century of our era.[1481] Herodotus[1482] says the Persians did not lack figs, and Reynier, who has made careful researches into the customs of this ancient people, does not mention the fig tree. This only proves that the species was not utilized and cultivated, but it perhaps existed in a wild state.
The Greeks called the wild fig erineos, and the Latins caprificus. Homer mentions a fig tree in the Iliad which grew near Troy.[1483] Hehn asserts[1484] that the cultivated fig cannot have been developed from the wild fig, but all botanists hold a contrary opinion;[1485] and, without speaking of floral details on which they rely, I may say that Gussone obtained from the same seeds plants of the form caprificus, and other varieties.[1486] The remark made by several scholars as to the absence of all mention of the cultivated fig sukai in the Iliad, does not therefore prove the absence of the fig tree in Greece at the time of the Trojan war. Homer mentions the sweet fig in the Odyssey, and that but vaguely. Hesiod, says Hehn, does not mention it, and Archilochus (700 B.C.) is the first to mention distinctly its cultivation by the Greeks of Paros. According to this, the species grew wild in Greece, at least in the Archipelago, before the introduction of cultivated varieties of Asiatic origin. Theophrastus and Dioscorides mention wild and cultivated figs.[1487]
Romulus and Remus, according to tradition, were nursed at the foot of a fig tree called ruminalis, from rumen, breast or udder.[1488] The Latin name, ficus, which Hehn derives, by an effort of erudition, from the Greek sukai,[1489] also argues an ancient existence in Italy, and Pliny’s opinion is positive on this head. The good cultivated varieties were of later introduction. They came from Greece, Syria, and Asia Minor. In the time of Tiberius, as now, the best figs came from the East.
We learnt at school how Cato exhibited to the assembled senators Carthaginian figs, still fresh, as a proof of the proximity of the hated country. The Phœnicians must have transported good varieties to the coast of Africa and their other colonies on the Mediterranean, even as far as the Canaries, where, however, the wild fig may have already existed.
For the Canaries we have a proof in the Guanchos words, arahormaze and achormaze, green figs, taharemenen and tehahunemen, dried figs. Webb and Berthelot,[1490] who quote these names, and who admit the common origin of the Guanchos and Berbers, would have noted with pleasure the existence among the Touaregs, a Berber people, of the word tahart, fig tree,[1491] and in the French-Berber dictionary, published since their time, the names tabeksist, green fig, and tagrourt, fig tree. These old names, of more ancient and local origin than Arabic, bear witness to a very ancient habitation in the north of Africa as far as the Canaries.
The result of our inquiry shows, then, that the prehistoric area of the fig tree covered the middle and southern part of the Mediterranean basin from Syria to the Canaries.
We may doubt the antiquity of the fig in the south of France, but a curious fact deserves mention. Planchon found in the quaternary tufa of Montpellier, and de Saporta[1492] in those of Aygalades near Marseilles, and in the quaternary strata of La Celle near Paris, leaves and even fruit of the wild Ficus carica, with teeth of Elephas primigenius, and leaves of plants of which some no longer exist, and others, like Laurus canariensis, have survived in the Canaries. So that the fig tree perhaps existed in its modern form in this remote epoch. It is possible that it perished in the south of France, as it certainly did at Paris, and reappeared later in a wild state in the southern region. Perhaps the fig trees which Webb and Berthelot had seen as old plants in the wildest part of the Canaries were descended from those which existed in the fourth epoch.
Bread-Fruit—Artocarpus incisa, Linnæus.
The bread-fruit tree was cultivated in all the islands of the Asiatic Archipelago, and of the great oceans near the equator, from Sumatra to the Marquesas Isles, when first Europeans began to visit them. Its fruit is constituted, like the pine-apple, of an assemblage of bracts and fruits welded into a fleshy mass, more or less spherical; and as in the pine-apple, the seeds come to nothing in the most productive cultivated varieties.[1493]