

THE DRAGON-TREE. J 33 



dreary watch on the edge of precipices, and gazing into 

 the abyss, or over into the pleasant valley of the Williams' 

 Fork, at the flocks of birds that do not venture to rest on 

 the thorny arms of the Petahaya ; though the wasp and 

 the gaily variegated woodpecker may be seen taking up 

 their abode in the old wounds and scars of sickly or 

 damaged specimens of this singular plant." * 



In the island of Teneriffe there still exists a tree which 

 is an object of scientific curiousity to every visitor, the 

 Dragon-tree of Orotava. It has been celebrated from the 

 discovery of the island, and even earlier, for it had been 

 venerated by the Guanches as a sacred tree from imme- 

 morial time. Its height is about seventy feet, but its 

 bulk is far more extraordinary. Le Dru found the cir- 

 cumference of the trunk, near the ground, to be seventy- 

 nine feet. Humboldt, who, when he ascended the Peak 

 in 1799, measured it some feet from the ground, found it 

 forty-eight feet ; and Sir G. Staunton gives thirty-six feet 

 as the circumference at a height of ten feet. 



The banyan, or sacred fig of India, acquires a prodigious 

 size, not by the enlargement of its individual trunk, but 

 by the multiplication of its trunks, in a peculiar manner 

 of growth. As its horizontal limbs spread on all sides, 

 shoots descend from them to the earth, in which they 

 root, and become so many secondary stems, extending 

 their own lateral branches, which in turn send down fresh 

 rooting shoots, thus ever widening the area of this won- 

 drous forest, composed of a single organic life. This is 



* Moilhausen's Journey to the Pacific, ii., p. 218. 



