286 PHYSIOGNOMY OP PLANTS. 



velopment of their closed vascular bundles, must by reason of their 

 floral parts be placed in the same natural family with asparagus and 

 garden onions, we must associate the Adansonia (monkey bread- 

 tree, Baobab), as being certainly among the largest and oldest in- 

 habitants of our planet. In the very first voyages of tiiscovery of 

 the Catalans and Portuguese, the navigators were accustomed to cut 

 their names on these two species of trees, not merely to gratify the 

 desire of handing down their names, but also to serve as marks or 

 signs of possession, and of whatever rights nations claim on the 

 ground of being the first discoverers. The Portuguese navigators 

 often used as their " marco" or token of possession, the French motto 

 of the Infant Don Henrique the Discoverer. Manuel de Faria y Sousa 

 says in his Asia Portuguesa (t. i. cap. 2, pp. 14 and 18) : " Era uso 

 de los primeros Navegantes de dexar inscrito el Motto del Infante, 

 talent de bien, faire, en la corteza de los arboles." (Compare also 

 Barros, Asia, dec. i. liv. ii. cap. 2, t. i. p. 148 ; Lisboa, 1778.) 



The above-named motto, cut on the bark of two trees by Portu- 

 guese navigators in 1435, twenty-eight years, therefore, before the 

 death of the Infante, is curiously connected in the history of disco- 

 veries with the elucidations to which the comparison of Vespucci's 

 fourth voyage with that of Gonzalo Coelho, in 1503, has given rise. 

 Vespucci relates that Coelho' s admiral's ship was wrecked on an 

 island which has been sometimes supposed to be San Fernando Nor- 

 onha, sometimes the Penedo de San Pedro, and sometimes the prob- 

 lematical Island of St. Matthew. This last-named island was dis- 

 covered by Garcia Jofre de Loaysa, on the 15th of October, 1525, 

 in 2 S. lat., in the meridian of Cape Palmas, almost in the Gulf 

 of Guinea. He remained there eighteen days at anchor, found 

 crosses, as well as orange trees which had been planted and had be- 

 come wild, and on two trunks of trees inscriptions dating back ninety 

 years. (Navarrete, t. v. pp. 8, 247, and 401.) I have examined 

 the questions presented by this account more in detail in my inquiries 

 into the trustworthiness of Amerigo Vespucci. (Examen critique de 

 Thist. de la Geographic, t. v. pp. 129-132.) 



The oldest description of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata), is 

 that given by the Venetian Aloysius Cadamosto (the real name was 

 Alvise da Ca da Mosto), in 1454. He found at the mouth of the 



