THE BAOBAB TREE. 121 



mimosas, the large-leafed bananas, and so many other beautiful 

 forms of vegetation alien to our cold and variable clime. While 

 our trees are but sparingly clad with scanty lichens and mosses, 

 they are there covered with stately bromelias and wondrous 

 orchids. Sweet-smelling vanillas and passifloras wind round 

 the giants of the forest, and large flowers break forth from their 

 rough bark, or even from their very roots. 



The number of known plants is estimated at about 200,000, 

 and the greater part of this vast multitude of species belongs to 

 the torrid zone. But if we consider how very imperfectly these 

 sunny regions have as yet been explored — that in South America 

 enormous forest lands and river basins have never yet been 

 visited by a naturalist — that the vegetation of the greater part 

 of Central Africa is still completely hidden in mystery — that no 

 botanist has ever yet penetrated into the interior of Madagascar, 

 Borneo, New Guinea, South-Western China, and Ultra-Gan- 

 getic India — and that, moreover, many of the countries visited 

 by travellers have been but very superficially examined — we 

 may well doubt whether even one fourth part of the tropical 

 plants is actually known to science. 



After these general remarks on the variety and exuberance 

 of tropical vegetation, I shall now briefly notice those plants 

 which, by their enormous size, their singularity of form, or 

 their frequency in the landscape, chiefly characterise the various 

 regions of the torrid zone. 



The African Baobab, or monkey-bread tree {Adansonia 

 digitata), may justly be called the elephant of the vegetable 

 world. Near the village Gumer, in Fassokl, Eussegger saw a 

 baobab thirty feet in diameter and ninety-five in circumference ; 

 the horizontally outstretched branches were so large that the 

 negroes could comfortably sleep upon them. The Venetian 

 traveller Cadamosto (1454) found, near the mouths of the 

 Senegal, baobabs measuring more than a hundred feet in cir- 

 cumference. As these vegetable giants are generally hollow^, 

 like our ancient willows, they are frequently made use of as 

 dwellings or stables ; and Dr. Livingstone mentions one in 



I which twenty or thirty men could lie down and sleep, as in a 

 hut. In the village of Grand Galarques, in Senegambia, the 

 negroes have decorated the entrance into the cavity of a, 



