272 VIEWS, &CC. PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



Adanson, however, makes the remark that other travellers 

 had found trunks having a diameter of about 32 feet.* 

 French and Dutch sailors had carved their names on the 

 trunks in characters six inches in length. One of these 

 inscriptions was of the fifteenth century,! while all the others 

 were of the sixteenth. From the depth of the cuts, which 

 are covered with new layers of wood.;}; and from a comparison 

 of the thickness of trunks, whose various ages were known, 

 Adanson computed the age of trees having a diameter of 32 

 feet at 5150 years. § He however cautiously subjoins the 

 following remarks, in a quaint mode of spelling which I do not 

 alter: " le calcul de l'aje de chake couche n*a pas d'exactitude 

 geometrike." In the village of Grand Galarques, also in Sene- 

 gambia, the negroes have adorned the entrance of a hollow 

 Baobab with carvings cut out of wood still green. The 

 inner cavity serves as a place of general meeting in which the 

 community debate on their interests. This hall reminds us 

 of the hollow (specus) in the interior of a plantain in Lycia, 

 in which the Roman ex-consul, Lucinius Mutianus, entertained 

 tw T enty-one guests. Pliny (xii. 3) gives to a cavity of this 

 kind the somewhat ample breadth of eighty Roman feet. 

 The Baobab was seen by Rene Caillie in the valley of the 

 Niger near Jenne, by Cailliaud in Nubia, and by Wilhelm 

 Peters along the whole eastern coast of Africa, where this 

 tree, which is called Mulapa, i.e. Nlapa-tree, or more cor- 

 rectly muti-nlapa, advances as far as Lourenzo Marques, 

 almost to 26° south lat. The oldest and thickest trunks seen 

 by Peters " measured from 60 to 75 feet in circumference." 

 Although Cadamosto observed, in the fifteenth century, 

 eminent ia non quadrat magnitudini; and although Golberry§ 

 found, in the " Vallee des deux Gagnacks," trunks only 



* This tree was formerly called "the Ethiopian sour gourd;" Julius 

 Scaliger, who gave it the name of Guanabanus, instances one, -which 

 seventeen men with outstretched arms could not encompass. The wood 

 is very perishable, and the negroes place in the hollow of these trees the 

 corpses of their conjurors, or of such persons who they suppose would 

 enchant or desecrate the ground, if buried in the usual way. — Ed. 



*f* Families des Plantes d Adanson, 1763, P. I. pp. ccxv — ccxviii. 

 The fourteenth century is here stated, but this is no doubt an error. 



X Adrien de Jussieu, Cours de Botanique, p. 62. 



§ Voyage au Senegal, 1757, p. 66. 



j| Fragmens dun voyage en Afrique, t. ii. p. 92. 



