104 TROPICAL PLANTS 



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 acidulated taste, 

 enveloping the dark brown seeds. They are a favourite food of 

 the monkeys, whence the 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 5000 years ; but a more careful investigation of the ra- 

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

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

 comparative youth, it attains the hoary aspect of extreme 

 senility. 



The baobab belongs to the same family as the mallow or the 

 hollyhock, and is, like them, emollient and mucilaginous in 

 all its parts. The dried and powdered leaves constitute the 

 lalo, which the Africans mix daily with their food for diminish- 

 ing excessive perspiration. The natives, likewise, make a strong 

 cord from the fibres contained in the pounded bark. The whole 

 of the trunk, as high as they can reach, is consequently often 

 quite denuded of its covering, which in the case of almost any 

 other tree would cause its death ; but this has no effect on the 

 baobab, except to make it throw out a new bark, and, as the 

 stripping is repeated frequently, it is common to see the lower 

 five or six feet an inch or two less in diameter than the parts 

 above. This monstrous tree ranges over a wide extent of Africa, 

 particularly in 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 ; and William Peters found it on the eastern coast, 

 near 26° S. lat. 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. Sir Emerson 

 Tennent found one of the largest, measuring upwards of thirty 

 feet in circumference ; and another at Putten, since destroyed 



