±2 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few blows 

 with his cutlass he will sever it as high up as he can reach, 

 and again below, some three feet down ; and, while you are 

 wondering at this seemingly wanton destruction, he lifts the 

 bar on high, throws his head back, and pours down his 

 thirsty throat a pint or more of pure cold water. This 

 hidden treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending 

 sap, or rather the ascending pure rain-water which has been 

 taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft to be elaborat- 

 ed into sap, and leaf, and flower, and fruit, and fresh tissue 

 for the very stem which it originally climbed, and therefore 

 it is that the woodman cuts the water- vine at the top of the 

 piece which he wants first, and not at the bottom, for so 

 rapid is the ascent of the sap that if he cut the stem below, 

 the water would all have fled upward before he could have 

 cut it off above." 



THE MONARCH OF AFRICAN FORESTS. 



1. Ik the tropical forests of Africa, extending across 

 the entire continent, one tree is found of such immense 

 size and longevity as to be justly considered the monarch 

 of the forests. This is the baobab, or, as it is called by the 

 French settlers on the Senegal, the monkey-bread tree. 

 The trunk of this tree usually does not exceed from fifteen 

 to thirty feet in height, though it sometimes attains an 

 elevation of sixty feet. In girth, however, it reaches the 

 enormous size of forty to seventy-five feet. The branches 

 are from fifty to seventy-five feet long, their extremities 

 bending toward the ground and often touching it. so as to 

 completely conceal the trunk. The leaves are large, com- 

 pound, and star-shaped, being divided into five radiating 

 leaflets. They are very abundant, and of a dark-green 

 color, the entire foliage casting a dense shade. 



