ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 289 



mous girth, and as they also reach to a great stature (above 230 Paris, 

 245 English, feet), they are singularly contrasted with our yew trees, 

 whose great dimension is in thickness only. Mr. Backhouse found 

 in Emu Bay, on the coast of Van Diemen Land, trunks of Euca- 

 lyptus which measured 70 English feet round the trunk near the 

 ground, and five feet higher up 50 English feet. (Gould, Birds of 

 Australia, vol. i. introd. p. xv.) 



It is not, as is commonly stated, Malpighi, but the ingenious 

 Michel Montaigne, who has the merit of having been the first, in 

 1581, in his Voyage en Italic, to notice the relation of the annual 

 rings to the age of the tree. (Adrien de Jussieu, Cours elementaire 

 de Botanique, 1840, p. 61.) A skilful artist, engaged in the pre- 

 paration of astronomical instruments, had called the attention of 

 Montaigne to the annual rings; and he also maintained that the 

 rings were narrower on the north side of the tree. Jean Jacques 

 Rousseau had the same belief; and his Emile, if he loses himself in 

 a forest, is to direct himself by the indications afforded by the rela- 

 tive thickness of the layers of wood. More recent observations on 

 the anatomy of plants teach us, however, that both the acceleration 

 and also the retardation or intermission of growth, or the varying 

 production of circles of ligneous fascicles (annual deposits) from the 

 Cambium cells, depend on influences which are wholly distinct from 

 the quarter of the heavens towards which one side of the annual 

 rings is turned. (Kunth, Lehrbuch der Botanik, 1847, t. i. s. 146 

 and 164; Lindley, Introduction to Botany, 2d edition, p. 75.) 



Trees which in individual cases attain a diameter of more than 

 twenty feet, and an age extending to many centuries, belong to the 

 most different natural families. I may name here Baobabs, Dragon- 

 trees, some species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium disticum (Rich.), Pinus 

 Lambertiana (Douglas), Hymenaea courbaril, Cassalpiniese, Bonabax, 

 Swietenia mahagoni, the Banyan tree (Ficus religiosa), Liriodendron 

 tulipifera? Platanus orientalis, and our Limes, Oaks, and Yews. 

 The celebrated Taxodium distichon, the Ahuahuete of the Mexicans 

 (Cupressus disticha Linn., Schubertia disticha Mirbel), at Santa Ma- 

 ria del Tule, in the state of Oaxaca, has not a diameter, of 57, as 

 Decandolle says, but of exactly 38 French (40 English) feet. 

 (Miihlenpfordt, Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik 

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