THE EOMANCE OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



they stood symmetrically arranged on the heights 

 and declivities of the mountains, to which they 

 imparted a most peculiar aspect, though certainly 

 not a beautiful one. Wonderful as each plant is, 

 when regarded singly, as a grand specimen of 

 vegetable life, these solemn, silent forms, which 

 stand motionless, even in a hurricane, give a 

 somewhat dreary character to the landscape. 

 Some look like petrified giants, stretching out 

 their arms in speechless pain, and others stand 

 like lonely sentinels, keeping their 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 Peta- 

 haya ; 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 curiosity 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 immemorial time. 

 Its height is about seventy feet, bat its bulk is far 

 more extraordinary. Le Dru found the circum- 

 ference of the trunk, near the ground, to be sev- 

 enty-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 



* Mollhausen's M Journey to the Pacific," ii. p. 218. 



130 



