272 Naturalist at Large 



one of the most clumsily shaped objects in the whole 

 plant kingdom. 



On another occasion at Santiago de Compostela in Spain 

 a slatternly old pod said to a friend beside her, "That chunk 

 of humanity ought to have snow on it." My answer sur- 

 prised her. I took my hat off and said, "Look, it has." Of 

 course she had no idea that I knew Spanish and she used a 

 pretty informal term for "chunk of humanity." It was ese 

 cacho de hombre. 



I shall not elaborate this thesis any further, for many of 

 the remarks made about me will not bear repetition in any 

 society, polite or otherwise. 



Dakar is a well-built and typical colonial tropical city 

 in the French style. It presents little of interest except the 

 noisy and colorful market where the gaily dressed Negro 

 women look as if they all came from either Martinique or 

 Guadeloupe, but for the naturalist there is a real high light 

 in the neighborhood provided he has the good fortune to 

 find it out. We did. We drove some miles into the coun- 

 try. Our real object was to see what there was in the way 

 of bird life but what we found was a great stand of enor- 

 mous baobab trees, I really believe the most wonderful 

 grove of its kind in the world. These trees must be ex- 

 tremely old and most of them have been chopped and 

 hollowed out, apparently to conserve the rain water, for 

 while this is a deserty part of Africa I take it that "when 

 it rains it pours." The Arabs say that the baobab tree, by 

 a divine mistake, grows upside down and that the strange, 

 ragged branches which we see extending from its enor- 

 mous trunk are really the roots sticking up in the air. None 

 of the trees were very tall but certainly few of them were 



