THE LADIES' FLORAL CABINET. 
139 
taka advantage. Its flowers are proportioned to the 
gigantic trunk ; they reach the leugth of from four to 
live inches, their breadth being from seven to eight. 
Tiie fruit, called by the French settlers on the Senegal 
Monkey's Bread, is an ovoid capsule, pointed at one 
of its extremities, and from twelve to twenty inches 
•Jong, by six to seven broad. It incloses in its interior 
from ten to forty cells, containing several kidney-shaped 
seeds, surrounded by mucilaginous pulp. 
Tho natives make a daily use of the dried leaves of 
the Baobab. They mix them with their food, for the 
purpose of reducing their excess of perspiration, and 
modifying the ardor of their fiery climate. The fruit is 
edible, its flesh is sweet, and of an agreeable flavor; the 
juice, when extracted and mixed with sugar, forms a 
beverage very useful in the putrid and pestilential fevers 
of the country. The bark of the Baobab furnishes a 
fibre which is made into ropes, and in Sengal woven 
iuto cloth. The fibre is so strong as to give rise to a 
common saying in Bengal: “As secure as an elephant 
bound with a Baobab rope.” The wood is soft, and 
subject to the attacks of a fungus which destroys its 
life and renders the part affected easily hollowed out. 
This work is done by the negroes fora very singular pur¬ 
pose. They enlarge these cavities, until the centre of 
the trunk is formed into a large chamber, in which they 
suspend the bodies of those among them whom they 
consider unworthy of the honors of burial. The en¬ 
trance to these chambers is then closed up with a plank, 
and the bodies suspended there soon become mummies, 
perfectly dry and well preserved, without any prepara¬ 
tion of embalmment. This kind of sepulture is espe¬ 
cially reserved for the Guerrots. The Guerrots are the 
musicians and poets, who in the tombs of negro kings 
preside at all fetes and dances. During their life, this 
kind of talent gives them influence, and makes them 
respected by other negroes, who look upon them as 
sorcerers, and honor them under the title; but after 
death this respect is succeeded by a kind of horror. 
These superstitious and infantile people imagine that if 
they consigned the body of one of these sorcerers to the 
earth,.as they would the bodies of other men, then they 
would draw upon themselves the celestial malediction. 
Among other remarkable vegetable productions, we 
notice the Dragon’s Blood Tree (Dracana Draco), a 
plant belonging to the natural order, Liliacce, uniting 
in its character, the beautiful Lily with the most noble 
of forest trees. We are indebted to the Treasury of 
Botany for the following interesting history, and descrip¬ 
tive of this tree. “ D. Draco has a tree-like stem, sim¬ 
ple or divided at the top, and often, when old, becoming 
much branched, each branch terminated by a crowded 
head of lanceolate leaves of a glaucous green color, 
which leaves embrace the stem by their base, and on 
falling off at maturity leaves a ring like cicatrix or scar. 
The flowers form a large terminal panicle, and are indi¬ 
vidually small, and of a greenish-white color. As seen 
in our green-houses, the plant is usually unbranched, 
being in its first age or infancy, which lasts, in its na¬ 
tive country, from twenty-five to thirty years. The 
1 second age,’ or period of maturity and reproduction, 
and the ‘ third age,’ or period of decay, are of indefinite 
extent. During the former of these, the scars of the 
leaves disappear, and the thickness of the trunk is at 
length increased by the formation of branches, and the 
consequent deposit of new matter; while in the latter 
stage, aerial roots appear, and glandular excrescences 
are formed. It is only when of great age that it 
branches. This tree derives its common name from a 
resinous exudation, known in commerce as dragon’s 
blood. The resin has been found in the sepulchral caves 
of the Guanchas, and has hence been supposed to have 
been used by them in embalming then - dead. The colos¬ 
sal Dragon tree at the town of Orotava, in Teneriffe, is 
a giant amongst the plants of this type of vegetation, 
being seventy feet high and forty-eight feet in circum¬ 
ference, with the antiquity which must, at least, be 
greater than that of the pyramids. The trunk of this 
tree is hollow, and may be ascended by a stair-case in 
the interior up to the height at which it begins to 
branch. Near the ground, Le Due found it to be seventy- 
nine feet in circumference. As to its great age, Hum¬ 
boldt mentions that, when he saw it, it had the same 
colossal size, which it had when the French adventurers, 
the. Bethencourts, conquered these gardens of the 
Hesperides in the beginning of the fifteenth century; yet 
it still flourishes as if in perpetual youth, bearing flowers 
and fruit. A tree like this, of slow growth, which four 
centuries have changed so little, may well be believed 
to possess great antiquity.” 
FLOWERS AND INSECTS. 
Plants bid for the services of insects. They display 
showy colors to attract them from a distance, and when 
individual flowers are small, we often find them massed 
together, so as to produce a greater effect by their 
grouping, as in Forget-me-not. Some flowers, as the 
Calceolaria and the Pea tribe, present convenient land¬ 
ing stages for the insect to alight upon before plunging 
into the interior of the flower for the honey of which it 
is in search. But though insects are invited, and the 
invitation is pretty general, it is not every flower that 
cares to be visited by [every insect. Insects below a 
certain size would be unable to do the work required by 
some flowers, or, again, they might travel in directions 
in which, however delightful such traveling might be 
to the insect, it would be productive of no useful results 
for the flower. Such flowers are often furnished with 
a palisade of stiff hairs, which present an impassable 
chevaux defrise to the undesirable insects which have 
to be kept out, and at the same tune limit the choice of 
direction for those of a larger size. In the showy Nas¬ 
turtiums of cottage gardens these defences are well 
marked. In some plants these hairs are turned back 
like sharks’ teeth, so that it is easy to get in, but not 
easy to get out without a deal of running about, which 
ensures some of the pollen coming in contact with the 
body of the insect. Bright streaks converging down 
