THE NIGERIAN TIMBER TREES 377 
one of the giant forest trees, attaining a girth of over 30 feet 
and a height of over 200 feet; its bole is one of the 
straightest of African trees, the trunk often reaching over 
100 feet without a branch. The crown is flattish and almost 
symmetrical in its roundness ; it is formed with three or four 
main limbs spreading out at almost right angles to the trunk. 
The foliage is heavy and the sword-shaped leaves almost appear 
as though they were digitate, looking at them from the base 
of the tree. From a short distance the trunk looks almost 
black, but on closer inspection the bark is seen to be deeply 
fissured in a comparatively even lattice-work fashion. The slash 
is white and a thick white latex exudes. The root spurns are 
only slight, except in old age; otherwise the bole is one of the 
most cylindrical of African trees. (In illustration No. 100 a tree of 
about 8 feet in girth shows the very straight and even thickness 
of the bole.) The fruit falls to the ground about the beginning 
of November, and crushes on contact with the ground, showing 
the yellow floury pulp inside. The pulp has an extremely 
dry, sweet, almost nauseating taste and is inclined to stick 
in the throat. This huge fruit, the size of a man’s fist, is almost 
like a huge plum, with rough opaque surface and almost spherical 
in shape ; inside, embedded in the pulp, are two, three or four 
lobed nuts, smooth and shiny on the more rounded face 
and rough on the other; in some respects they are roughly 
kidney-shaped when looked at sideways. The flowers are 
white and small; the tree loses its leaves for three or four days, 
when fresh ones come out again. 
The sapwood is white and the heartwood of a rich red 
colour, often showing figured rosy grain ; it is very hard, heavy 
and very durable, and is sometimes cross-grained, though 
usually the texture is fine and planes up with a smooth surface ; 
it saws well, but is too hard to take nails, except in very thin 
wood. The sapwood is usually only two or three inches wide ; 
the heartwood forms comparatively early in the life of the 
tree. On the whole, this tree has a more open grain than the 
other Mimusops. 
Although the tree can stand a little shade in its youth, it 
is really a light-loving species : after the first year the height- 
growth rapidly increases when trees standing in a plantation 
have plenty of light. In illustration No. 93 some trees only twelve 
years old show how rapidly they develop under suitable con- 
ditions. None of these trees have yet come into the nut-bearing 
stage, but it appears that in favourable localities the trees will 
bear fruit between the fifteenth and twentieth year. 
It is a soil protecting and improving tree—in fact, the thick 
