SOME CURIOUS VEGETABLE GROWTHS. 37 



types. Its myrtles, proteazeas, acacias, and gum-trees exhibit most 

 curious forms, and the grasses, ferns, beeches, araucarias, screw-palms, 

 and bananas are represented ; while the thorny rattans wind among 

 the thickets so as to form impenetrable copses. 



One of the most curious trees of Northwestern Australia is the 

 monkey-bread tree {Adansonia Gregorii), a baobab, which is plainly 

 distinguished from the African baobab {Adansonia digitata), the only 

 species hitherto known, by its short fruit-stalks. The trunk is swollen 

 to a considerable extent, and the tissues are charged with a mucus like 

 that of the mallows, of which the sheep feeding in the region are very 

 fond, and which they find quite refreshing. The tree is remarkable, 

 among its fellow-plants of the sandstone table-land on which it grows, 

 for its habit of shedding its leaves periodically a peculiarity which is 

 shared by hardly a dozen among all the Australian trees. Associated 

 with this baobab are relatives of other African plants, of the legumi- 

 nous Erythroplacum, or poison-tree, and the tamarind ; and to these 

 may be added an ally of the Indian crow-nut, or nux vomica. 



Many of the Australian plants exhibit various aberrations in the 

 form of their leaves, with some of which specimens of their eucalyp- 

 tus have made us acquainted. The acacias, which are very abundant, 

 and appear in three hundred species, are many of them, as well as 

 some other leguminous plants, distinctly marked from similar plants 

 in Asia, Africa, and America, by having not veined leaves but phyl- 

 lods, or leaf -like structures, in which the petiole becomes so much de- 

 veloped as to assume the appearance and perform the functions of a 

 leaf. 



Another remarkable adaptation of leaf-forms is exemplified in the 

 Brazilian plant called the Bauhinia, the leaves of which are deeply cleft 

 into two lobes, and given a form which is graphically described by 

 the name Unha de boi, " ox-hoof," which the Portuguese give to the 

 plant. At daybreak, the leaves are borne with both lobes spread out 

 horizontally ; as the sun rises in the sky, the lobes rise, and are drawn 

 toward each other, till, in the more sensitive species {Bauhinia Bra- 

 ziliensis), they are completely doubled up, with their backs in contact. 

 As the sun goes down, they begin to separate again, growing wider 

 apart as the afternoon advances, till in the evening they appear again 

 spread out level. During the night they again contract and become 

 folded together. Herr Fritz Midler had an opportunity while in Brazil 

 of observing one of these plants at noon, when a part of the leaves 

 were shaded by the tree under which he was resting. Leaves that 

 were quite closed together, or the lobes of which formed an acute angle 

 with each other, spread out as soon as the shadow struck them, and 

 eventually became horizontal, and even appeared to turn their lobes 

 downward. In no other instance, however, did Herr Muller find the 

 upper surface of the lobes of the leaves inclined to each other at a 

 larger angle than 180. 



