Heterogeneity of Date Fruits

Abstract

WHEN I was washing a population of date fruits collected from one and the same palm tree, variety “Hayyani”, I noticed that some fruits floated to the surface of the water while others sank to the bottom of the vessel. I then analysed samples of both floating and sunken fruits and found much smaller sugar content in the former than in the latter. It was therefore thought advisable to investigate the possibility of floating such fruits in water and also in aqueous solutions of sodium chloride as a criterion for segregation of such population into more or less homogeneous batches with regard to their sugar contents. This was done by putting the whole fruit population in a big vessel containing distilled water and then collecting all the fruits that floated as one batch ; the sunken fruits were afterwards put in aqueous solutions containing 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 per cent pure sodium chloride, and in each case the floating fruits were collected, washed with distilled water and finally analysed (after excluding the seeds), together with the last batch which sank in the 10 per cent sodium chloride solution.