THE BAOBAB. 



527 



moreover, Taany of the countries visited by travelers have been but very superficially 

 and hastily examined, — we may well doubt whether even one-fourth part of the tropical 

 plants is actually known to science. What a vast field for future naturalists ! What 

 prospects for the trade and industry of future generations ! 



After these general remarks on the variety and exuberance of tropical vegetation, I 

 shall now briefly review those plants which, by their enormous size, their singularity 

 of form, or their frequency in the landscape, chiefly characterize the various regions 

 of the torrid zone in different parts of the globe. 



The African Baobab, or " monkey-bread tree," {Adansonia digitata,') may justly 

 be called the elephant of the vegetable world. Near the village Gumer, in F assokl, 

 Russegger saw a baobab thirty feet in diameter and ninety-five in circumference ; the 

 horizontally outstretched branches were so large that the negroes could comfortably 

 sleep upon them. The Venetian traveler Cadamosto (1454) found, near the mouths 

 of the Senegal, baobabs measuring more than a hundred feet in circumference. As 

 these vegetable giants are generally hollow, they are frequently made use of as dwell- 

 ings or stables. Livingstone mentions one in which twenty or thirty men could lie 

 down and sleep, as in a hut. As the baobab begins to decay in the part where the 

 trunk divides into the largar branches, and the process of destruction thence continues 

 downwards, the hollow space fills, during the rainy season, with water, which keeps a 

 long time, from its being protected against the rays of the sun. The baobab thus 

 forms a vegetable cistern. 



The hight of the baobab does not correspond to its bulk, as it seldom exceeds sixty 

 feet. As it is of very rapid growth, it acquires a diameter of three or four feet and its 

 full altitude in about thirty years, and then continues to grow in circumference. The 

 larger beam-like branches, almost as thick at their extremity as at their origin, are 

 abruptly rounded, and then send forth smaller branches, with large, light green, pal- 

 mated leaves. The bark is smooth and greyish. The oval fruits, which are of the 

 size of large cucumbers, and brownish yellow when ripe, hang from long twisted spongy 

 stalks, and contain a white farinaceous substance, of an agreeable acidulated taste, 

 enveloping the dark brown seeds. They are a favorite food of the monkeys, whence 

 the tree has derived one of its names. From the depth of the incrustations formed on 

 the marks which the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century used to cut in the 

 large baobabs which they found growing on the African coast, and by comparing the 

 relative dimensions of several trunks of a known age, Adanson concluded that a baobab 

 of thirty feet in diameter must have lived at least 5,000 years ; but a more careful 

 investigation of the rapid growth of the spongy wood has reduced the age of the giant 

 tree to more moderate limits, and proved that, even in comparative youth, it attains 

 the hoary aspect of extreme senility. 



The baobab belongs to the same family as the mallow or the hollyhock. It ranges 

 over a wide extent of Africa, particularly in parts where the summer rains fall in 

 abundance, as in Senegambia, in Soudan, and in Nubia, Livingstone admired its 

 colossal proportions on the banks of the Zouga and the Zambesi; under a great 

 baobab near this river lie the remains of his wife, who bore him company during his 

 journeyings; and William Peters found it on the eastern coast, near 26° south 

 latitude. It forms a conspicuous feature in the landscape at Manaar in Ceylon. 

 Tennent found one of the largest, measuring upwards of thirty feet in circumference^ 



