28 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
The African baobab is held by botanists to be the 
oldest and largest specimen of vegetable growth in the 
world. Adanson saw one in the Cape Verde Islands 
within whose trunk, overlaid by three hundred close 
layers of wood, he discovered an inscription carved by 
two English travellers three centuries before. By the 
aid and position of this inscription he was able to ar- 
rive at a correct estimate not only of the length of 
time which it took the tree to grow or increase in size, 
but the exact age of the tree itself, which he puts 
down at five thousand one hundred and fifty years. 
The stem ordinarily attains only ten or twelve feet 
in height, but is thirty-four feet in diameter; this 
immense foundation being necessary to support the 
foliage that grows on it. The main branch rises per- 
pendicularly sixty feet in diameter, and from it shoot 
other branches, extending horizontally fifty or more 
feet on all sides, and which, being loaded with the most 
exuberant growth of leaves, forms a verdant crown of 
something like one hundred and sixty feet in diameter; a 
single tree giving thus the appearance of a forest. It is 
called by a name which signifies “a thousand years,” 
which would seem to be in agreement with the calcula- 
tion of its age by all herbalists. A group of these bao- 
bab trees, crowning the summit of its rocks, gives the 
name of the Cape Verde Isles—“ Green Cape.” The 
next in size, and of course in age, are the celebrated 
pines of California, known by various popular names 
among the miners and other inhabitants of the district 
in which they grow: “The mammoth Washington Tree,” 
which was discovered by the naturalist Lob on the Sierra 
Nevada, at an elevation of five thousand feet; “The 
Miner’s Cabin,” which is large enough for a comfortable 
dwelling-place, being a hollow tree three hundred feet 
high, with an excavation seventeen feet in breadth and 
thirty feet in circumference ; “ The Three Sisters,” three 
trees which, springing from one root, are so interlaced 
