With the dragon trees, which, notwithstanding the gigantic development of their closed vascular bundles, must by reason of their floral parts be placed in the same natural family with asparagus and garden onions, we must associate the Adansonia (monkey bread-tree, Baobab,) as being certainly among the largest and oldest inhabitants of our planet. In the very first voyages of discovery of the Catalans and Portuguese, the navigators were accustomed to cut their names on these two species of trees, not merely to gratify the desire of handing down their names, but also to serve as marks or signs of possession, and of whatever rights nations claim on the ground of being the first discoverers. The Portuguese navigators often used as their “marco” or token of possession the French motto of the Infant Don Henrique the Discoverer. Manuel de Faria y Sousa says in his Asia Portuguesa (T. i. cap. 2, pp. 14 and 18):—“Era uso de los primeros Navegantes de dexar inscrito el Motto del Infante, talent de bien faire, en la corteza de los arboles.” (Compare also Barros, Asia, Dec. I. liv. ii. cap. 2, T. i. p. 148; Lisboa, 1778.)
The above-named motto cut on the bark of two trees by Portuguese navigators in 1435, twenty-eight years therefore before the death of the Infante, is curiously connected in the history of discoveries with the elucidations to which the comparison of Vespucci’s fourth voyage with that of Gonzalo Coelho, in 1503, has given rise. Vespucci relates that Coelho’s admiral’s ship was wrecked on an island which has been sometimes supposed to be San Fernando Noronha, sometimes the Peñedo de San Pedro, and sometimes the problematical Island of St. Matthew. This last-named island was discovered by Garcia Jofre de Loaysa on the 15th of October, 1525, in 2½° S. lat., in the meridian of Cape Palmas, almost in the Gulf of Guinea. He remained there eighteen days at anchor, found crosses, as well as orange trees which had been planted and had become wild, and on two trunks of trees inscriptions dating back ninety years. (Navarrete, T. v. pp. 8, 247, and 401.) I have examined the questions presented by this account more in detail in my inquiries into the trustworthiness of Amerigo Vespucci. (Examen critique de l’hist. de la Geographie, T. v. pp. 129-132.)
The oldest description of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata), is that given by the Venetian Aloysius Cadamosto (the real name was Alvise da Ca da Mosto), in 1454. He found at the mouth of the Senegal, trunks of which he estimated the circumference at seventeen fathoms, or 102 feet, (Ramusio, Vol. i. p. 109): he might have compared them with Dragon trees which he had seen before. Perrottet says in his “Flore de Sénégambie” (p. 76), that he had seen monkey bread-trees which, with a height of only about 70 or 80 feet, had a diameter of 32 English feet. The same dimensions had been given by Adanson, in the account of his voyage in 1748; the largest trunks which he himself saw (in 1749) in one of the small Magdalena islands near Cape de Verd, and in the vicinity of the mouth of the Senegal River, were from 26 to 28½ English feet in diameter, with a height of little more than 70 feet, and a top about 180 feet broad; but he adds at the same time, that other travellers had found trunks of nearly 32 English feet diameter. French and Dutch sailors had cut their names on the trees seen by Adanson in letters half a foot long; the dates added to the names shewed these inscriptions to be all of the 16th century, except one which belonged to the 15th. (In Adanson’s “Familles des Plantes,” 1763, P. I. pp. ccxv.-ccxviii., it stands as the 14th century, but this is doubtless an error of inadvertence.) From the depth of the inscriptions, which were covered with new layers of wood, and from the comparison of the thickness of different trunks of the same species in which the relative age of the trees was known, Adanson computed the probable age of the larger trees, and found for a diameter of 32 English feet 5150 years. (Voyage au Sènegal, 1757, p. 66.) He prudently adds (I do not alter his curious orthography):—“Le calcul de l’aje de chake couche n’a pas d’exactitude géometrike.” In the village of Grand Galarques, also in Senegambia, the negroes have ornamented the entrance of a hollow Baobab tree with sculptures cut out of the still fresh wood; the interior serves for holding meetings in which their interests are debated. Such a hall of assembly reminds one of the hollow or cave (specus) of the plane tree in Lycia, in which Lucinius Mutianus, who had previously been consul, feasted with twenty-one guests. Plino (xii. 8) assigns to such a cavity in a hollow tree the somewhat large allowance of a breadth of eighty Roman feet. The Baobab was seen by Réné Caillié in the Valley of the Niger near Jenne, by Caillaud in Nubia, and by Wilhelm Peters along the whole eastern coast of Africa (where it is called Mulapa, i. e. Nlapa-tree, more properly Muti-nlapa) as far as Lourenzo Marques, almost to 26° of S. lat. Although Cadamosto said in the 15th century “eminentia non quadrat magnitudini,” and although Golberry (Fragmens d’un Voyage en Afrique, T. ii. p. 92) found in the “Vallée des deux Gagnacks” trunks which, with 36 English feet diameter near the roots, were only 64 English feet high, yet this great disproportion between height and thickness must not be regarded as general. The learned traveller Peters remarks that “very old trees lose height by the gradual decay of the top, while they continue to increase in girth. On the East Coast of Africa one sees not unfrequently trunks of little more than ten feet diameter reach a height of 69 English feet.”
If, according to what has been said, the bold estimations of Adanson and Perottet assign to the Adansonias measured by them an age of from 5150 to 6000 years, which would make them contemporaneous with the epoch of the building of the Pyramids or even with that of Menes, a period when the constellation of the Southern Cross was still visible in Northern Germany (Kosmos, Bd. iii. S. 402 and 487; Eng. ed. p. 293, and note 146), on the other hand, the more secure estimations made from the annual rings of trees in our northern temperate zone, and from the ratio which has been found to subsist between the thickness of the layer of wood and the time of growth, give us shorter periods. Decandolle finds as the result of his inquiries, that of all European species of trees the yew is that which attains the greatest age. He assigns to the yew (Taxus baccata) of Braborne, in the county of Kent, thirty centuries; to the Scotch yew of Fortingal, from twenty-five to twenty-six; and to those of Crowhurst in Surrey, and Ripon in Yorkshire, respectively, fourteen and a half and twelve centuries. (Decandolle, de la longévité des arbres, p. 65.) Endlicher remarks that the age of another yew tree, in the Churchyard of Grasford, in North Wales, which measures 52 English feet in circumference below the branches, is estimated at 1400 years, and that of a yew in Derbyshire at 2096 years. In Lithuania lime trees have been cut down which were 87 English feet in circumference, and in which 815 annual rings have been counted. (Endlicher, Grundzüge der Botanik, S. 399.) In the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere some species of Eucalyptus attain an enormous girth, and as they also reach to a great stature (above 230 Paris, 245 English, feet), they are singularly contrasted with our yew trees, whose great dimension is in thickness only. Mr. Backhouse found in Emu Bay, on the coast of Van Diemen Land, trunks of Eucalyptus which measured 70 English feet round the trunk near the ground, and five feet higher up 50 English feet. (Gould, Birds of Australia, Vol. I. Introd. p. xv.)
It is not, as is commonly stated, Malpighi, but the ingenious Michel Montaigne, who has the merit of having been the first, in 1581, in his Voyage en Italie, to notice the relation of the annual rings to the age of the tree. (Adrien de Jussieu, Cours élémentaire de Botanique, 1840, p. 61.) A skilful artist, engaged in the preparation of astronomical instruments, had called the attention of Montaigne to the annual rings; and he also maintained that the rings were narrower on the north side of the tree. Jean Jacques Rousseau had the same belief; and his Emile, if he loses himself in a forest, is to direct himself by the indications afforded by the relative thickness of the layers of wood. More recent observations on the anatomy of plants teach us, however, that both the acceleration and also the retardation or intermission of growth, or the varying production of circles of ligneous fascicles (annual deposits) from the Cambium cells, depend on influences which are wholly distinct from the quarter of the heavens towards which one side of the annual rings is turned. (Kunth, Lehrbuch der Botanik, 1847, T. i. S. 146 and 164; Lindley, Introduction to Botany, 2d edition, p. 75.)
Trees which in individual cases attain a diameter of more than twenty feet, and an age extending to many centuries, belong to the most different natural families. I may name here Baobabs, Dragon-trees, some species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium disticum (Rich.), Pinus Lambertiana (Douglas), Hymenæa courbaril, Cæsalpinieæ, Bombax, Swietenia mahagoni, the Banyan tree (Ficus religiosa), Liriodendron tulipifera? Platanus orientalis, and our Limes, Oaks, and Yews. The celebrated Taxodium distichon, the Ahuahuete of the Mexicans, (Cupressus disticha Linn., Schubertia disticha Mirbel); at Santa Maria del Tule, in the state of Oaxaca, has not a diameter of 57, as Decandolle says, but of exactly 38 French (40½ English) feet. (Mühlenpfordt, Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik Mexico, Bd. i. S. 153.) The two fine Ahuahuetes near Chapoltepec, which I have often seen, and which are probably the surviving remnants of an ancient garden or pleasure-ground of Montezuma, measure, (according to Burkart’s account of his travels, Bd. i. S. 268, a work which otherwise contains much information), only 36 and 38 English feet in circumference; not in diameter, as has often been erroneously asserted. The Buddhists in Ceylon venerate the gigantic trunk of the sacred fig-tree of Anourahdepoura. The Indian fig-tree or Banyan, of which the branches take root round the parent stem, forming, as Onesicritus well described, a leafy canopy resembling a many-pillared tent, often attain a thickness of 28 (29½ English) feet diameter. (Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, Bd. i. S. 260.) On the Bombax ceiba, see early notices of the time of Columbus, in Bembo’s Historiæ Venetæ, 1551, fol. 83.
Among oak-trees, of those which have been accurately measured, the largest in Europe is no doubt that near the town of Saintes, in the Departement de la Charente Inférieure, on the road to Cozes. This tree, which is 60 (64 English) feet high, has a diameter of 27 feet 8½ inches (29½ English feet) near the ground; 21½ (almost 23 English) feet five feet higher up; and where the great boughs commence 6 Parisian feet (6 feet 5 inches English.) In the dead part of the trunk a little chamber has been arranged, from 10 feet 8 inches to 12 feet 9 inches wide, and 9 feet 8 inches high (all English measure), with a semi-circular bench cut out of the fresh wood. A window gives light to the interior, so that the sides of the chamber (which is closed with a door) are clothed with ferns and lichens, giving it a pleasing appearance. Judging by the size of a small piece of wood which has been cut out above the door, and in which the marks of 200 annular rings have been counted, the oak of Saintes would be between 1800 and 2000 years old. (Annales de la Société d’Agriculture de la Rochelle, 1843, p. 380.)
In the wild rose-tree of the crypt of the Cathedral of Hildesheim, said to be a thousand years old, it is the root only, and not the stem, which is eight centuries old, according to accurate information derived from ancient and trustworthy original documents, for the knowledge of which I am indebted to the kindness of Stadtgerichts-Assessor Römer. A legend connects the rose-tree with a vow made by the first founder of the cathedral, Ludwig the Pious; and an original document of the 11th century says, “that when Bishop Hezilo rebuilt the cathedral which had been burnt down, he enclosed the roots of the rose-tree with a vault which still exists, raised upon this vault the crypt, which was re-consecrated in 1061, and spread out the branches of the rose-tree upon the walls.” The stem now living is 26½ feet high and about two inches thick, and the outspread branches cover about 32 feet of the external wall of the eastern crypt; it is doubtless of considerable antiquity, and well deserving of the celebrity which it has gained throughout Germany.
If extraordinary development in point of size is to be regarded as a proof of long continued organic life, particular attention is due to one of the thalassophytes of the sub-marine vegetable world, i. e., to the Fucus giganteus, or Macrocystis pyrifera of Agardh. According to Captain Cook and George Forster, this sea-plant attains a length of 360 English feet; surpassing, therefore, the height of the loftiest Coniferæ, even that of the Sequoia gigantea, Endl., or Taxodium sempervirens, Hook and Arnott, which grows in California. (Darwin, Journal of Researches into Natural History, 1845, p. 239; and Captain Fitz-Roy in the Narrative of the Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, vol. ii. p. 363.) Macrocystis pyrifera is found from 64° south to 45° north latitude, as far as San Francisco on the north-west coast of America; and Joseph Hooker believes it to extend as far as Kamtschatka. In the Antarctic seas it is even seen floating among the pack-ice. (Joseph Hooker, Botany of the Antarctic Voyage under the command of Sir James Ross, 1844, pp. 7, 1, and 178; Camille Montagne, Botanique cryptogame du Voyage de la Bonite, 1846, p. 36.) The immense length to which the bands or ribbands and the cords or lines of the cellular tissue of the Macrocystis attain, appears to be limited only by accidental injuries.
[13] p. 17.—“Species of phænogamous plants already contained in herbariums.”