VEGETABLE VAGARIES. 



271 



illustration. This, however, is no case of ordinarily inherited decrepitude and 

 decay, but, as an ancient British jury would have it, it is the outcome of the direct 

 act of Providence. It is, in fact, what must- have been the towering monarch 

 of the surrounding forest, shattered in the full plenitude of its might by a lightning 

 flash. There is no resurrecting, phoenix-wise, as in the previously illustrated instance, 

 from this cataclasmic overthrow. Destruction is thorough and complete. And yet, as 

 though even now the whole soul of the living organism had not abandoned it, one 



W, SaMle-Eent, Photo. 



LIGHTNING-SHATTERED BAOBAB THEE, NEAR DERBY, KING'S SOUND, WESTERN AUSTRALIA. 



upstanding angle of the blasted trunk is fashioned into the similitude of a weird 

 monstrous bird that has mounted guard and broods like a disembodied spirit over 

 the desolation wrought. 



Among the most characteristic and bizarre of the Australian indigenous 

 vegetable products must be included the so-called " Grass-trees," referable to the 

 genera Xanthorrhaea and Kingia. The more popular title for these singular plants is 

 that of "Blackboys," the aspect of the usually more or less incinerated trunks of the 

 aborescent species, as seen from a little distance, being to a considerable extent 



