THE LONGEVITY OF TREES. 119 
ance to the tempests which would overthrow ordinary trees. 
Its roots spread in a similar manner beneath the soil. When 
laid bare by a torrent that has washed away the earth, they 
have been traced to a distance of more than a hundred feet 
without reaching their extremity. The history of these Bao- 
babs, possibly of the very trees which Adanson’s account has 
rendered famous, reaches back to the discovery of that part 
of the African coast, and of the Cape de Verde Islands, by 
Cadamosto, in 1455; who, in his narrative, mentions the sin- 
gular disproportion between the height and the girth of these 
trees! But they were first fully described by the French 
naturalist Adanson, who examined them about a century ago. 
The largest trunks that Adanson measured were eighty-five 
feet in circumference, or twenty-seven in diameter. Golberry 
is said to have measured one that was over a hundred feet in 
girth. Quite recently, M. Perrottet has met with many Bao- 
babs in Senegambia, varying from sixty to ninety feet in cir- 
cumference, yet still in a green old age, and showing no signs 
of decrepitude. There can be no doubt, therefore, respecting 
the prodigious size which these trees attain; and there is 
great reason to believe that they are among the oldest deni- 
zens of our planet. Indeed, their age is plausibly estimated 
at five or six thousand years. And the younger De Candolle 
has placed so much confidence in this estimate that he has 
employed it as a standard of comparison in the case of the 
Mexican Cypresses which we have just considered. If the 
evidence were really as direct as is generally thought, we could 
interpose no serious objection to such a conclusion. But a 
critical examination proves that the whole account given by 
recent writers, upon Adanson’s authority, is strangely at 
variance with his own statements. 
The current narrative is substantially and briefly as fol- 
lows: —that Adanson observed, at the Madelaine Islands, 
near Cape de Verde, some Baobab-trees of thirty feet in 
1 “Arbores vero ibi sunt tante magnitudinis, ut earum ambitus sit 
pedum xvii, licet eminentia altitudinis non quadret magnitudini ; non 
enim altius tolluntur quam pedes xx,” ete. (A. Cadamusti, Navig., e. 
xliii., in Gryneus, Noy. Orb., p. 45.) 
