VEGETABLE VAGARIES. 971 
illustration. This, however, is no case of ordinarily inherited decrepitude and 
decay, but, as an ancient British jury would have it, it is the outcome of the direct 
act of Providence. It is, in fact, what must: have been the towering monarch 
of the surrounding forest, shattered in the full plenitude of its might by a lightning 
flash. There is no resurrecting, phcenix-wise, as in the previously illustrated instance, 
from this cataclasmic overthrow. Destruction is thorough and complete. And yet, as 
though even now the whole soul of the living organism had not abandoned it, one 
W. Saville-Kent, Photo, 
LIGHTNING-SHATTERED BAOBAB TREE, NEAR DERBY, KING’S SOUND, WESTERN AUSTRALIA. 
upstanding angle of the blasted trunk is fashioned into the similitude of a_ weird 
monstrous bird that has mounted guard and broods like a disembodied spirit over 
the desolation wrought. 
Among the most characteristic and bizarre of the Australian indigenous 
vegetable products must be included the so-called “ Grass-trees,” referable to the 
genera Xanthorrheea and Kingia. The more popular title for these singular plants is 
that of “Blackboys,” the aspect of the usually more or less incinerated trunks of the 
aborescent species, as seen from a little distance, being to a conside rable extent 
