274 VIEWS, &C. PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



Eucalyptus trunks which, with a circumference of 70 feet at 

 the base, measured as much as 50 feet at a little more than 5 

 feet from the ground.* 



It was not Malpighi, as has been generally asserted, but the 

 intellectual Michel Montaigne, who had the merit of first 

 showing, in 1581, in his Voyage en Italie, the relation that 

 exists between the annual rings and the age of the tree.f An 

 intelligent artisan, engaged in the preparation of astronomical 

 instruments, first drew Montaigne's attention to the significance 

 of the annual rings, asserting that the part of the trunk directed 

 towards the north had narrower rings. Jean Jacques Rousseau 

 entertained the same opinion ; and his Emile, when he loses 

 himself in the forest, is made to direct his course in accord- 

 ance with the deposition of the layers of wood. Recent 

 phyto- anatomical observations^ teach us, however, that the 

 acceleration of vegetation as well as the remission of growth, 

 and the varying production of the circles of the ligneous 

 bundles (annual deposits) from the cambium cells, depend on 

 other influences than position with respect to the quarter of 

 the heavens. 



Trees which in the case of some examples attain a diameter 

 of more than 20 feet, and an age of many centuries, belong 

 to very different natural families. We may here instance 

 Baobabs, Dragon trees, various species of Eucalyptus, 

 Taxodium distichum, (Rich.,) Pinus Lambertiana, (Douglasii,) 

 Hymeneea Courbaril, Csesalpinieas, Bombax, Swietenia Maha- 

 goni, the Banyan tree (Ficus religiosa), Liriodendron tuli- 

 pifera(?), Platanus orientalis, and our Lindens, Oaks, and 

 Yews. The celebrated Taxodium distichon, the Ahuahuete of 

 the Mexicans (Cupressus clisticha, Linn., Schubertia disticha, 

 Mirbel), of Santa Maria del Tule, in the State of Oaxaca, 

 has not a diameter of 60 feet, as stated by Decandolle, but 

 exactly 40^ feet.§ The two beautiful Ahuahuetcs which I 

 have frequently seen at Chapoltepec (growing in what was 

 probably once a garden or pleasure ground of Montezuma) 

 measure, according to the instructive account in Burkardt's 



* Gould, Birds of Australia, vol. i. Introrl. p. xv. 



+ Adrien de Jussieu, Cours elementaire de Botanique, 1840, p. 61. 



% Kunth, Lehrbuch der Botanik, th. i. 1847, s. 146, 164; Lindley, 

 Introduction to Botany, 2nd cd. p. 75. 



§ Miihlenpfordt, Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Bepublik 

 Mexico, bd. i. s. 153. 



