300 ENORMOUS ANTIQUITY OF BAOBABS. 



table monsters, whose natural habitat are the intensely 

 dry, stony, almost waterless tracts of Bush Region, 

 where the annual period of growth is generally re- 

 stricted by drought to a very short part of each year 

 naturally contributes to spread their term of exist- 

 ence over long periods of time, during which the tree 

 stubbornly continues to put forth its little tuft of leaves 

 during the short rainy season, and then relapses into 

 its apparently lifeless state for the remainder of the 

 year; and thus it comes that the learned Baron von 

 Humboldt considered them " the oldest living organic 

 monuments of our planet" * for in endorsing the con- 

 clusions come to by Adanson respecting the great 

 trees described by him, Humboldt remarks: "they 

 would date back to the times of the builders of the 

 Pyramids, or even to Menes, an epoch when the con- 

 stellation of the Southern Cross was still visible in 

 Northern Germany." f 



An old Baobab therefore forms, as might be ex- 

 pected, a striking and venerable object, which is generally 

 visible from a great distance in the landscape, whose 

 vegetation mostly consists, as we have already shown, 

 of dwarf and thorny mimosse. " One must in fact 

 have seen and contemplated this giant of the vegetation 

 of the tropics to obtain an idea of it one imagines 

 oneself dreaming on seeing it." Thus the French 

 traveller, Comte D'Escayrac de Lauture, speaks of 

 the Baobab. 



It has been a general subject of remark among 



* Quoted in Smith's Dictionary of Economic Plants, 1882. 



f Ansichten der Natur, by Alexander von Humboldt. 



Le Desert et le Soudan, Etudes sur PAfrique du Nord, par Mon- 

 sieur le Comte D'Escayrac de Lauture, 1853 p. 77 (Translated from 

 the French). 



