THE BAOBAB TREE. 



123 



comparative youth, it attains the hoary aspect of extreme 

 senility. 



The baobab, which belongs to the same family as the mallow 

 or the hollyhock, and is, like them, emollient and mucilaginous 

 in all its parts, ranges over a wide extent of Africa, particularly 

 in the parts where the summer rains fall in abundance, as 

 in Senegambia, in Soudan, and in Nubia. Dr. Livingstone 

 admired its colossal proportions on the banks of the Zouga and 

 the Zambesi. It forms a conspicuous feature in the landscape 

 at Manaar in Ceylon, where it has most likely been introduced 

 by early mariners, perhaps even by the Phoenicians, as the pro- 

 digious dimensions of the trees are altogether inconsistent with 

 the popular conjecture of a Portuguese origin. 



Another tree very characteristic of Africa, and frequently 

 seen along with the baobab, is the large arborescent Euphorbia 

 {E. arborescens), surmounted at the top with stiff leaves, 

 branching out like the arms of a huge candelabra. It adds 

 greatly to the strange wildness of the landscape, and seems 

 quite in character with the aspect of the unwieldy rhinoceros 

 and the long-necked giraffe. 



Dracaenas, or dragon-trees, are found growing on the west 

 coast of Africa and in the Cape Colony, in Bourbon and in 



China ; but it is only in the 

 Canary Islands, in Madeira, 

 and Porto Santo, that they at- 

 tain such gigantic dimensions 

 as to entitle them to rank 

 among the vegetable wonders 

 of the world. 



Unfortunately, the venera- 

 ble dragon-tree of Orotava, in 

 Teneriffe, which was already 

 reverenced for its age by the 

 extirpated nation of the Guan- 

 ches, and which the adventu- 

 rous Bethencourts, the con- 

 querors of the Canaries, found 

 hardly less colossal and cavernous in 1402 than Humboldt, 

 who visited it in 1799, was destroyed by a storm in 1871. 

 Above the roots the illustrious traveller measured a circum^ 



dragox-tree of orotava. 



