122 THE TROPICAL WORLD. 



wood, and make use of the interior as a kind of assembly room, 

 where they meet to deliberate on the interests of their small 

 community, ' reminding one,' says Humboldt, ' of the cele- 

 brated plantain in Lycia, in whose hollow trunk the Eoman 

 consul, Lucinius Mutianus, once dined with a party of twenty- 

 one.' As the baobab begins to decay in the part where the 

 trunk divides into the larger branches, and the process of de- 

 struction thence continues downwards, the hollow space fills, 

 during the rainy season, with water, which keeps a long time, 

 from its being protected against the rays of the sun. The 

 baobab thus forms a vegetable eistern, whose water the neigh- 

 bouring villagers sell to travellers. In Kordofan 'the Arabs 

 climb upon the tree, fill the water in leathern buckets, and let 

 it down from above ; but the people in Congo more ingeniously 

 bore a hole in the trunk, which they stop, after having tapped 

 as much as they require.* 



The height of the baobab does not correspond to its amazing 

 bulk, as it seldom exceeds sixty feet. As it is of very rapid 

 growth, it acquires a diameter of three or four feet and its full 

 altitude in about thirty years, and then continues to grow in 

 circumference. The larger beam-like branches, almost as thick 

 at their extremity as at their origin, are abruptly rounded, and 

 then send forth smaller branches, with large, light green, pal- 

 mated leaves. The bark is smooth and greyish. The oval 

 fruits, which are of the size of large cucumbers, and brownish- 

 yellow when ripe, hang from long twisted spongy stalks, and 

 contain a white farinaceous substance, of an agreeable acidu- 

 lated taste, enveloping the dark brown seeds. They are a 

 favourite food of the monkeys, whence tbe tree has derived one 

 of its names. 



From the depth of the incrustations formed on the marks 

 which the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century 

 used to cut in the large baobabs which they found growing 

 on the African coast, and by comparing the relative dimen- 

 sions of several trunks of a known age, Adanson concluded 

 that a baobab of thirty feet in diameter must have lived at 

 least 5,000 years ; but a more careful investigation of the 

 rapid growth of the spongy wood has reduced the age of the 

 giant tree to more moderate limits, and proved that, even in 

 * P'Esciiyr<ac, ' Le Pes^rt et le Sgudiin,' 



