BiiOBAP- HORTUS JAM Arc ENS IS. 4T 



snid are followed by an oblouiT fruit, pointed at both ends, about ten inches lo!i_2;, five 

 or six broad, and oovered with a Icind of greonisli down, under wliicli is a iigneou.s rind, 

 bard and ahnost black, marked widi rays which divide it length\viso into sides.- Tlie 

 fruit hangs to the tree by a pedicel two feet len;!; and an inch diameter. It contains a 

 whitish, spongy, juicv, substar.'e ; with seeds of brown colour, and shaped like a ki 1- 

 iiey bean. The bark of tins tree is near]}- an inch tluck, of an ash-co!oiired grey, greasy 

 to the touch, bright, and very smooth ; the outside is covered with a kind of varnish ; 

 and the inside is green, speckled with red. Tixe wood is white and very soft ; the early 

 shoots are fircen and down^. The leaves of the young plants are entire, of an oblong 

 form, about four or five inches long, antl almost tlu-ee broad towards the top, having- 

 several veins running from the middle rib ; the_v are of a lucid green colour. As the 

 plants advance in height, tlie leaves alter, and are divided into tliree parts, and after- 

 wards into five lobes, which spread out m the shape of an hand. In its native soil, the 

 tree sheds its leaves in November, and new ones begin to appear in June. It flowers 

 in July, and the fruit ripens in October and November. It is very common in Senegal 

 and the Cape de Verd islands ; and is found one hundi'ed leagues up the country at 

 Gnulam, and upon the sea coast as far as. .Sierra Leona. 



The age of this tree is perhaps no less remarkal)!e than its enormous si;;e. IM. Ad.an- 

 son velate.i, that, in a botanic al excni-sion to the Magdalene islands, in tiie neighbour- 

 hood of Goree, -he discovered some Calabash tre^s, from five to six feet in diameter, 

 on the bark of which were engraved or cut to a considerahle depth, a number of Euro- 

 pean names. Two of these names, which he was at the trouble to repair, we-rc dated, 

 one the 1 1th, and the other the 15th century. The letters were about six inches long, 

 but in breailth they occupied a very small part only of the circimifersnce of the trunk ; 

 whence be concluded they ha.d not hceacut when these trees were y-Oting. These in- 

 scriptions, however, he thinks sufficient to determine pretty nearlv the age which these 

 calabash trees may attain ; for even supposing that those in c|uescioii were cut in their 

 tiriy yenrs, and that the trees grew to, the diameter of six.feet in two centnries, as the 

 engraved letters evii!.ce how many centuries must be re^Adsite to give them a diameter 

 of twenty-five feet, which perhaps is not the last term of their growth. The inscribed 

 trees mentioned bv this ingenious PYenclm^an had been .seen in IS.')5, almost two cen- 

 turies before, by Tlievet, , who mentions them in the relation of his voji.ge to I'crra 

 Antarctica or A ustralis. Adanson saw them in 1749. 



. The virtues and uses of tl^is tree and its fruit are various: The negroes of Senegal 

 dry the bark and leaves in tiie shaded air, and then reduce them to a powder, which is 

 of a pretty good green colour; This powder they preserve in bags of linen or cotton, 

 and call it lil/o. . Tliey use it every^ day, putting two or three pinches of it into a mess, 

 whatever it happens to be, as we do pepper and salt: but their view is, not to give 

 relish to the food, but to preserve a plentifid and peqjetual perspiration, and to at- 

 teinpcr the too great heat of the blood ; purposes which it certidnly answers, as several 

 Europeans have proved by repeated experiments, preser^ing themselves freni the epi- 

 demic fever, which, in that country, destroys Europeans like the plague, and gene- 

 ra!!v rages during the niondis of Septem!)er and October, when, the rains having sud- 

 denly ceased, the sun exhales tiie water left by them upon (he ground, and fills the air 

 with a noxioiTs vapour. M. Adanson, in that critical season, made a light ptisan of the 

 leaves of the baobab, which he had gathered in the August of the preceding year, and 

 had dried in the.siiade, and drank constantly about a pint of it every morning, either 

 before or after breakfast, and the same quantity of it every evening after the heat of the 

 ' - sun 



