BAOBAB TREE. 
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species is, that notwithstanding its immense size, a 
trifling injury is sufficient to destroy it. We are 
told that it thrives best in moist and sandy situa- 
tions, though it is occasionally found in stony 
districts. If this tree be wounded deeply in the 
principal root, (even the least scratch is pernicious,) 
it soon begins to rot, and the evil spreading to the 
trunk quickly destroys the tree. Besides the rot, 
which attacks the trunk when the root is cut, the 
baobab is subject to another evil, not so common 
indeed, but equally fatal. This is a kind of mouldi- 
ness which spreads over all the woody part, and so 
softens it, that the tree no longer preserves its usual 
consistence. In this state the trunk, monstrous as 
it is, can no longer resist the violence of the winds, 
but falls a sacrifice to the first storm that blows. 
In its native country the seed of the baobab, sown 
in a sandy earth where there is plenty of moisture, 
will vegetate in the course of seven or eight days ; 
and in a month the young tree will be a foot high. 
In the first summer its altitude will be increased to 
five or six feet, and its stem to an inch or an inch 
and a half in diameter. In this manner the plant 
continues progressively to increase, till, from a slen- 
der stick, it becomes in time a most prodigious tree. 
Some of those which Adanson saw in Senegal mea- 
sured twenty-seven feet in diameter, and Kay says 
that between the rivers Niger and Gambia their 
dimensions are so monstrous, that seventeen men, 
joining hands, could hardly surround one of them ; 
from which we may conclude that the largest of 
