ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 285 



the Villa Franqui was made on Borda's first voyage with Pingre*, in 

 1771; not in his second voyage, in 1776, with Yarela. It is affirm- 

 ed that in the earlier times of the Norman and Spanish Conquests, 

 in the 15th century, Mass was said at a small altar erected in the 

 hollow trunk of the tree. Unfortunately, the dragon-tree of Orotava 

 lost one side of its top in the storm of the 21st of July, 1819. There 

 is a fine and large English copperplate engraving which represents 

 the present state of the tree with remarkable truth to nature. 



The monumental character of these colossal living vegetable forms, 

 and the kind of reverence which has been felt for them among all 

 nations, have occasioned in modern times the bestowal of greater 

 care in the numerical determination of their age and the size of their 

 trunks. The results of these inquiries have led the author of the 

 important treatise, " De la longe'vite' des Arbres," the elder Decan- 

 dolle, Endlicher, Unger, and other able botanists, to consider it not 

 improbable that the age of several individual tree's which are still 

 alive, goes back to the earliest historical periods, if not of Egypt, at 

 least of Greece and Italy. It is said in the Bibliotheque Universelle 

 de Geneve, 1831, t. Ixvii. p. 50 : " Plusieurs exemples semblent 

 confirmer Tidee qu'il existe encore sur le globe des arbres d'une 

 antiquit^ prodigieuse, et peut-etre t&noins de ses demises revolu- 

 tions physiques. Lorsqu'on regarde un arbre comme un agregat 

 d'autant d'individus soudes ensemble qu'il s'est developpe de bour- 

 geons k sa surface, on ne peut pas s'etonner si, de - nouveaux bour- 

 geons s'ajoutant sans cesse aux anciens, 1'agregat qui en re"sulte n'a 

 point de terme necessaire son existence." In the same manner 

 Agardh says : u If in trees there are produced in each solar year 

 new parts, so that the older hardened parts are replaced by new ones 

 capable of conducting sap, we see herein a type of growth limited 

 only by external causes." He ascribes the shortness of the life of 

 herbs, or of such plants as are not trees, " to the preponderance of 

 the production of flowers and fruit over the formation of leaves." 

 Unfruitfulness is to a plant a prolongation of life. Endlicher cites 

 the example of a plant of Medicago sativa, var. /3 versicolor, which, 

 bearing no fruit, lived eighty years. (Grundziige der Botanik, 1843, 

 s. 1003.) 



With the dragon trees, which, notwithstanding the gigantic de- 



