THE LONGEVITY OF TREES. 123 
We close our enumeration, already too protracted, with a 
ease of longevity, perhaps transcending that of the oldest 
Baobabs, or of the Mexican Cypresses; namely, the famous 
Dragon-tree (Dracena Draco) of the city of Orotava, in 
Teneriffe. This tree has been visited by many competent 
observers ; and among others, by that prince of scientific . 
travelers, the veteran Humboldt, who has given a good figure 
of it, as it appeared about seventy years ago, from a drawing 
made by M. Ozonne in 1776. A later and much fulier ac- 
count was published about twenty years since, by M. Berthe- 
lot,! who has assiduously devoted many years to the study of 
the civil and natural history of the Canary Islands; and a 
fine figure of the mutilated trunk, as it appeared after the 
terrible storm of the 21st of July, 1819, forms one of the 
most striking pictorial illustrations of that elaborate and ex- 
cellent work, the “ Histoire Naturelle des Hes Canaries,” by 
P. Barker Webb, Esq., and M. Berthelot. 
The trunk is by no means equal in size to some of the trees 
already noticed. It is only fifty feet in girth at the base, and 
not more than sixty or seventy in elevation. But, at the dis- 
covery of Teneriffe in 1402, nearly four and a half centuries 
ago, this Dragon-tree was nearly as large as at the present 
day, and had been immemorially an object of veneration 
among the Guanches. After the conquest, at the close of the 
fifteenth century, the trunk was employed as a boundary in 
dividing the lands, and as such is mentioned in ancient docu- 
ments. It had changed very little since that period, except 
that the centre had been hollowed by slow decay, until the 
summer of 1819, when a third of its spreading top was carried 
away by a tempest. But it still continues to vegetate; and 
its remaining branches are still annually crowned, — as they 
have been each returning autumn, perhaps for hundreds of 
centuries, with its beautiful clusters of white, lily-like blos- 
soms, — emblems of “the eternal youth of nature.” 
The Dragon-tree, like its allies the Palms, and unlike 
ordinary trees, does not increase in diameter by annual con- 
centric layers. The usual means of investigation are here of 
1 In “ Nova Acta Acad. Nat. Cur.,” xiii., 1827, p. 781. 
