378 THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 
Mallows, none excited greater surprise than the Adansonias, or 
Baobab trees of Africa, when they were first introduced to the 
botanical world; their enormous size, and their prodigious lon- 
gevity, estimated in some instances at some thousands of years, 
took the world by surprise. 
The Baosas (Adansonia digitata) is a tree of tropical Africa, 
which has been transplanted by man into Asia and America. 
It may be ranged among the marvels of nature. lis trunk 
does not exceed fifteen or eighteen feet*in height, but its girth 
is enormous, attaining, as it sometimes does, the circumference 
of thirty to forty feet. This trunk separates at the summit 
into branches fifty to sixty feet long, which bend towards the 
earth at their extremities. The trunk being short, and the 
branches thus curving towards the earth, it follows that. the 
Baobab presents at a distance the appearance of a dome, or 
rather a ball, of verdure, over a circuit of a hundred and sixty 
feet. Adanson concluded, from the observations he made, and 
from his calculations upon their growth, that some of the spect 
mens which he studied could not have been less than 6,000 
years old. But it is the general opinion of botanists that this 
estimate was enormously overrated. One of these monstrous 
trees is represented as photographed from nature in Plate XIV. 
This colossal vegetable was first observed by Adanson on the aa 
Senegal, and, after him, the genus was named Adansonia. The a 
Baobabs have since been discovered in the Soudan at Darfour, and 4 
in Abyssinia. sake 
The bark and leaves of this tree possess considerable emollient 
properties, of which the natives of Senegal take advantage. =” 
flowers are proportioned to the gigantic trunk; they ee : oo 
length of four and a half and five inches, their breadth bens 
from seven to eight. The fruit, called by the F rench settlers me ia 
the Senegal Monkeys’ Bread, is an ovoid capsule, pointed at 0” 
of its extremities, and from twelve to twenty inches long, by a 
to seven broad ; that is, the fruit is about the size of @ — agen 
It encloses in its interior from ten to forty cells, containing seve"™ 
kidney-shaped seeds, surrounded by mucilaginous pulp. Baobab. — : 
The natives make a daily use of the dried Jeaves of the their ee 
They mix them with their food, for the purpose of reducing a — ; 
Its | 
