146 



that the adansonia, like the ochroma, and all 

 the plants of the family of bombax, grow much 

 more rapidly * than the draccena, the vegeta- 

 tion of which is very slow. That in Mr. Fran- 

 qui's garden bears still every year both flowers 

 and fruit. It's aspect feelingly recalls to mind 

 " that eternal youth ^ of nature," which is an 

 inexhaustible source of motion and of life. 

 The draccena, which is seen only in cultivated 



those monstrous trees, which he saw in 1604, and of which 

 he says very truly, " eminentia altitudinis rton quadrat magni- 

 iudini." Cadam. Navig. chap. 42. At Senegal, and near 

 Praya, in the islands of Cape Verd, Messrs, Adanson and 

 Staunton remarked adansonia?, the trunks of which were 

 from 56 to 60 feet in circumference. Voy. au Senegal, t. i, 

 p. 54. The baobab 34 feet in diameter was seen by Mr, 

 Golberry, in the valley of the two Gagnacks. Fragment 

 d'un Voy. en Afrique, t. ii, p. 92. 



* It is the same with the plane-tree { platanus occidentals) 

 which Mr. Michaux measured at Marietta, on the banks of 

 the Ohio, and which, at twenty feet from the ground, wa& 

 15*7 feet in diameter (Voy. a. TOuest des Monts Alleghany, 

 1804, p. 93). The taxus, chesnut, oak, plane-tree, cupressus 

 disticha, bombax, mimosa, caesalpinia, hymenea, and draccena, 

 appear to me to be the plants, which, in different climates^ 

 offer specimens of the most extraordinary growth. An oak, 

 discovered together with some Gallic helmets in 1809, in the 

 turf pits of the department of the Somme, near the village of 

 Yseux, seven leagues from Abbeville, was about the same 

 size as the dragon-tree of Orotava. According to a memoir 

 by Mr. Traullee, the trunk of this oak was 14 feet in dia- 

 meter. 



t Aristot. de Longit. Vitae, cap. vi, (ed Casaub, p. 442.) 



