250 
PRUNING AND THINNING. 
[Part IY. 
branchless to two hundred and fifty feet from 
the ground, and were there thirteen feet in 
diameter. If the new annual ring of wood were 
a quarter of an inch wide, trees would attain 
this diameter in three hundred and sixty years; 
and, supposing them to have grown a foot a year 
in height, this would allow them eighty feet of 
head above the branchless stem. 
These measurements, which I called marvellous 
in the first edition of this treatise, are (together 
with the guesses in reference to the age of the 
trees) rather put in the shade by the following. 
Adanson measured a baobab tree (Adansonia 
digitata) to be thirty feet in diameter, and gives 
it the astounding and patriarchal age of 5150 
years. This would be very slow growth ; 
scarcely more than the twenty-ninth part of an 
inch for the width of each annual ring; that 
is, if the width of the annual ring were the 
twenty-ninth part of an inch, the tree would 
attain the diameter of thirty feet in 5220 years, 
or in seventy years more than the supposed age 
of the tree. 
The age of this identical baobab, then, at 
Noah’s deluge, being short of 1000 years, its 
diameter would be short of six feet, and its 
