SIZES OF GREAT TAMARIND TREES. 305 



in the Tropics ; * and for ourselves we may say we 

 have never tired of admiring the venerable beauty of 

 some of these great Indian trees, whose age must 

 certainly be numbered by many hundreds of years. It 

 is unfortunate that history rarely enables us to fix the 

 ages of trees ; the most that it generally enables us to 

 do is to find certain specimens made mention of at some 

 distant era in the past, when they were already noticed, 

 not as young, but even then as aged trees, venerable 

 and striking for their majestic appearance. The bio- 

 grapher is then sometimes, but alas ! on but rare occa- 

 sions, constrained to mention them in his writings. 



We fear we are not in a position to say where the 

 finest and greatest of such trees are to be found; Sir 

 Samuel Baker mentions one growing in Ceylon nearly 

 forty feet in circumference, with branches covering 

 nearly half an acre of ground ; f near the Sacred City 

 of Benares also are many splendid specimens, and at 

 Allahabad (the present capital of the N.W. provinces) 

 there is, among others, a specially fine tree in the 

 garden of the "Khusru Bagh," which was occupied 

 as the head-quarters of Lyakut Ali, the leader of the 

 Allahabad mutineers in i85y. This tree measures 28 

 feet in circumference, and has an immense spread of 

 branches. The Tamarind is at all times a tree of sin- 

 gular beauty, and is also evergreen, bearing some 

 resemblance in leaf and colour to a gigantic yew-tree, 

 but the foliage which is much more soft and feathery 

 is of a lighter green and grows very close and thick, 



* Eight Years in Ceylon, by Sir Sam. Baker, 1855, p. 262. 



f The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon, by Sir Samuel Baker, 1854. 



This man was known as "The Moulavie" by caste a weaver, 

 by trade a schoolmaster, but really a religious fanatic and pretender 

 to Royal descent. 



VOL. I. 20 



