TREE-STUDIES. 



47 



After a second short march of one hour and a half, 

 we pitched tents and obtained lodgings in Bomani, 

 " the Stockade," a frontier village, but within the juris- 

 diction of Bagamoyo. On this road, which ascended the 

 old sea-beach, patches of open forest and of high rank 

 grass divided cultivated clearings, where huts and 

 hamlets appeared, and where modest young maidens 

 beckoned us as we passed. The vegetation is here 

 partly African, partly Indian. The Mbuyu, — the baobab, 

 Adansonia digitata, monkey-bread, or calabash, the Mo- 

 wana of the southern and the Kuka of the northern 

 regions, — is of more markedly bulbous form than on the 

 coast, where the trunk is columnar ; its heavy extre- 

 mities, depressed by the wind, give it the shape of a 

 lumpy umbrella shading the other wild growths. There 

 appear to be two varieties of this tree, similar in bole 

 but differing in foliage and in general appearance. The 

 normal Mbuyu has a long leaf, and the drooping outline 

 of the mass is convex ; the rarer, observed only upon the 

 Usagara Mountains, has a small leaf, in colour like the 

 wild indigo, and the arms striking upwards assume the 

 appearance of a bowl. The lower bottoms, where the soil 

 is rich, grow the Mgude, also called Mparamusi (Taxus 

 elongatus, the Geel hout or Yellow- wood of the Cape?) a 

 perfect specimen of arboreal beauty. Atall tapering shaft, 

 without knot or break, straight and clean as a main-mast 

 forty or forty-five feet in height, and painted with a 

 tender greenish-yellow, is crowned with parachute-shaped 

 masses of vivid emerald foliage, whilst sometimes two and 

 even three pillars spring from the same root. TheMvumo, 

 — a distorted toddy tree, orHyphsena allied to theDaum 

 palm of Egypt and Arabia, — has a trunk rough with 

 the drooping remnants of withered fronds, above which 

 it divides itself into branches resembling a system of Y's. 



