hoes woo in every vaulted cell;
405 While on white wings delighted Cupids play,
Shake their bright lamps, and shed celestial day.

Closed in an azure fig by fairy spells,
Bosom'd in down, fair CAPRI-FICA dwells;--

[_Caprificus_. l. 408 Wild fig. The fruit of the fig is not a
seed-vessel, but a receptacle inclosing the flower within it. As these
trees bear some male and others female flowers, immured on all sides by
the fruit, the manner of their fecundation was very unintelligible, till
Tournefort and Pontedera discovered, that a kind of gnat produced in the
male figs carried the fecundating dust on its wings, (Cynips Psenes
Syst. Nat. 919.), and, penetrating the female fig, thus impregnated
the flowers; for the evidence of this wonderful fact, see the word
Caprification, in Milne's Botanical Dictionary. The figs of this country
are all female, and their seeds not prolific; and therefore they can only
be propagated by layers and suckers.

Monsieur de la Hire has shewn in the Memoir, de l'Academ. de Science,
that the summer figs of Paris, in Provence, Italy, and Malta, have all
perfect stamina, and ripen not only their fruits, but their seed; from
which seed other fig-trees are raised; but that the stamina of the
autumnal figs are abortive, perhaps owing to the want of due warmth. Mr.
Milne, in his Botanical Dictionary (art. Caprification), says, that the
cultivated fig-trees have a few male flowers placed above the female
within the same covering or receptacle; which in warmer climates perform
their proper office, but in colder ones become abortive: And Linneus
observes, that some figs have the navel of the receptacle open; which
was one reason that induced him to remove this plant from the class
Clandestine Marriage to the class Polygamy. Lin. Spec. Plant.

From all these circumstances I should conjecture, that those female
fig-flowers, which are closed on all sides in the fruit or receptacle
without any male ones, are monsters, which have been propagated for their
fruit, like barberries, and grapes without seeds in them; and that the
Caprification is either an ancient process of imaginary use, and blindly
followed in some countries, or that it may contribute to ripen the fig
by decreasing its vigour, like cutting off a circle of the bark from the
branch of a pear-tree. Tournefort seems inclined to this opinion; who
says, that the figs in Provence and at Paris ripen sooner, if their buds