284 PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



ground, Le Dru made it nearly 79 English feet. Sir George Staun- 

 ton found the diameter still as much as 12 feet at the height of 10 

 feet above the ground. The height of the tree is not much above 69 

 English feet. According to tradition, this tree was venerated by the 

 Guanches (as was the ash-tree of Ephesus by the Greeks, or as the 

 Lydian plane-tree which Xerxes decked with ornaments, and the 

 sacred Banyan-tree of Ceylon), and at the time of the first expedi- 

 tion of the Be"thencourts in 1402, it was already as thick and as 

 hollow as it now is. Remembering that the Dracaena grows ex- 

 tremely slowly, we are led to infer the high antiquity of the tree of 

 Orotava. Bertholet, in his description of Teneriffe, says, "En 

 comparant les jeunes Dragonniers, voisins de Tarbre gigantesque, les 

 calculs qu'on fait sur Tage de ce dernier effraient T imagination." 

 (Nova Acta Acad. Leop. Carol. Naturae Curiosorum, t. xiii. 1827, 

 p. 781.) The dragon-tree has been cultivated in the Canaries, and 

 in Madeira and Porto Santo, from the earliest times; and an accurate 

 observer, Leopold von Buch, has even found it wild in Teneriffe, 

 near Igueste. Its original country, therefore, is not India, as had 

 long been believed ; nor does its appearance in the Canaries contra- 

 dict the opinion of those who regard the Guanches as having been an 

 isolated Atlantic nation without intercourse with African or Asiatic 

 nations. The form of the Dracaenas is repeated at the southern 

 extremity of Africa, in the Isle of Bourbon, and in New Zealand. 

 In all ' these distant regions species of the genus in question are 

 found, but none have been met with in the New Continent, where 

 its form is replaced by that of the Yucca. Dracaena borealis of 

 Aiton is a true Convallaria, and has all the " habitus" of that genus. 

 (Humboldt, Rel. hist. t. i. pp. 118 and 639.) I have given a repre- 

 sentation of the dragon-tree of Orotava, taken from a drawing made 

 by F. d'Ozonne in 1776, in the last plate of the Picturesque Atlas 

 of my American journey. (Vues des Cordilleres et Monumens des 

 Peuples indigenes de TAmerique, pi. Ixix.) I found d'Ozonne's 

 drawing among the manuscripts left by the celebrated Borda, in the 

 still unprinted travelling journal entrusted to me by the Depot de la 

 Marine, and from which I borrowed important astronomically deter- 

 mined geographical, as well as barometric and trigonometric, notices. 

 (Rel. hist. t. i. p. 282.). The measurement of the dragon-tree of 



