THE BAOBAB TREE. 



THE Baobab or Ethiopian Sour-Gourd, is one of the largest, and 

 certainly one of the most grotesque trees in the world. Its 

 height is from forty to seventy feet, and not at all in propor- 

 tion to the size of its trunk, which sometimes attains the great 

 diameter of thirty feet. It soon divides into branches of great size 

 which bear a dense mass of deciduous leaves somewhat like those of 

 the Horse -Chestnut The flowers are large, white, solitary, and 

 pendent on long stalks, and when expanded are about six inches 

 across. The fruit is an oblong, woody capsule, covered with a short 

 down, and from eight to twelve inches long, in appearance somewhat 

 like a gourd; laterally it is divided into eight or ten cells, each filled 

 with a pulpy substance in which the seeds are immersed. 



The Baobab, known botanically as Adansonia digit at a, of the 

 Mallow family, is a native of many parts of Africa, and is cultivated 

 in many of the warm parts of the world. It has been called "the tree 

 of a thousand years," and Humboldt speaks of it as "the oldest organic 

 monument upon our planet " Adanson, whose name the genus bears, 

 and who traveled in Senegal in 1794, has given an account of this 

 tree. He made a calculation to show that one of them, thirty feet in 

 diameter, must be 5150 years old. He saw two trees, from five to six 

 feet in diameter, on the bark of which were cut to a considerable 

 depth a number of European names; two of these were dated, the one 

 in the 14th, the other in the 15th century. In 1555 the same trees 

 were seen by Thevet, another French traveller, who mentioned them 

 in the account of his voyage. 



The bark of the Baobab furnishes a fibre which is made into 

 ropes, and in Senegal is woven into cloth. The wood is soft and sub- 

 ject to the attacks of a fungus which destroys its life and renders the 

 part affected easily hollowed out. Livingston speaks of a hollow trunk 

 within which twenty to thirty men could lie down with ease. The 

 pulp of the fruit is slightly acid, agreeable, and often eaten. — Trcasjiry 

 of Botany. 



1 have just completed the manuscript of a Catalogue of the Cretace- 

 ous and Tertiary Plants of North America, which includes 2631 species 

 and varieties. The last catalogue of similar scope, published by Prof. 

 Leo Lesquereux in 1876, embraced only 706 species, thus showing 

 that the flora of these horizons has been nearly quadrupled in the last 

 twenty-one years. — F. H. Knoivlton, U. S. National Museum. 



