I have given a representation, in the last plate of the Picturesque Atlas of my American journey,[[MA]] of the dragon-tree of Orotava, taken from a drawing made in 1776 by F. d’Ozonne, and which I found among the posthumous papers of the celebrated Borda, in the still unprinted journal entrusted to me by the Dépôt de la Marine, and from which I have borrowed important astronomically-determined geographical, data besides many barometrical and trigonometrical notices.[[MB]] The measurement of the dragon-tree in the Villa Franqui was made in Borda’s first voyage with Pingré in 1771, and not in the second, made 1776 with Varela. It is asserted, that in the fifteenth century, during the early periods of the Norman and Spanish conquests, mass was performed at a small altar erected in the hollow trunk of this tree. Unfortunately, the Dracæna of Orotava lost one side of its leafy top in the storm of the 21st of July, 1819. There is a fine large English copper-plate engraving, which gives an exceedingly true representation of the present condition of the tree.
The monumental character of these colossal living forms, and the impression of reverence which they have created among all nations, have led, in modern times, to a more careful study of the numerical determination of their age, and of the size of their trunks. The results of such investigations induced the elder Decandolle, (the author of the important treatise, entitled De la Longévité des Arbres,) Endlicher, Unger, and other distinguished botanists to conjecture, that the age of many existing vegetable forms may extend to the earliest historical times, if not to the records of the Nile, at least to those of Greece and Italy. In the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève (t. xlvii. 1831, p. 50) we find the following passage: “Numerous examples seem to confirm the idea, that there still exist, on our planet, trees of a prodigious antiquity—the witnesses, perhaps, of one or more of its latest physical revolutions. If we consider a tree as the combination of as many individual forms as there have been buds developed on its surface, one cannot be surprised if the aggregate resulting from the continual addition of new buds to the older ones, should not necessarily have any fixed termination to its existence.” In the same manner, Agardh says: “If in each solar year new parts be formed in the plant, and the older hardened ones be replaced by new parts capable of conducting sap, we have a type of growth limited by external causes alone.” He ascribes the short duration of the life of herbaceous plants, “to the preponderance of the production of blossoms and fruit over the formation of leaves.” Unfruitfulness in a plant insures a prolongation of its life. Endlicher adduces the instance of an individual plant of Medicago sativa, var. β versicolor, which lived eighty years because it bore no fruit.[[MC]]
To the dragon-trees, which, notwithstanding the gigantic development of their closed vascular bundles, must be classed, in respect to their floral parts, in the same natural family as Asparagus and the garden onion, belongs the Adansonia, (the monkey bread-tree, Baobab), undoubtedly among the largest and most ancient inhabitants of our planet. In the earliest voyages of discovery made by Catalans and Portuguese, the sailors were accustomed to carve their names on these two species of trees; not always from a mere wish of perpetuating their memory, but also as “marcos,” or signs of possession, and of the rights which nations assume in virtue of first discovery. The Portuguese mariners often selected for carving on the trees, as a “marco,” or mark of possession, the elegant French motto talent de bien faire, so frequently employed by the Infante Don Henrique, the Discoverer. Thus Manuel de Faria y Sousa says expressly;[[MD]] “Era uso de los primeros Navegantes de dexar inscrito el motto del Infante, talent de bien faire, en la corteza de los arboles.”[[ME]] (It was the custom of the early navigators to inscribe the motto of the Infante in the bark of the trees.)
The above-named motto, cut on the bark of two trees by Portuguese navigators in the year 1435, and therefore twenty-eight years before the death of the Infante Don Henrique, Duke of Viseo, is singularly connected, in the history of discoveries, with the discussions that have arisen from a comparison of Vespucci’s fourth voyage with that of Gonzalo Coelho (1503). Vespucci relates, that the Admiral’s ship of Coelho’s squadron was wrecked on an island which was sometimes supposed to be that of San Fernando Noronha; sometimes, Peñedo de San Pedro; and sometimes, the problematical island of St. Matthew. The last-named island was discovered on the 15th of October, 1525, by Garcia Jofre de Loaysa in 2½ south lat., in the meridian of Cape Palmas, and almost in the Gulf of Guinea. He remained there eighteen days at anchor, and found crosses, orange-trees that had become wild, and two trunks of trees having inscriptions that bore the date of ninety years back.[[MF]] I have in another place,[[MG]] in an inquiry regarding the trustworthiness of Amerigo Vespucci, more fully considered this problem.
The oldest description of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata) is that of the Venetian, Aloysius Cadamosto. (whose real name was Alvise da Ca da Mosto) in 1454. He found at the mouth of the Senegal. (where he joined Antoniotto Usodimare), trunks, whose circumference he estimated at 17 fathoms, or 112 feet.[[MH]] He might have compared them to dragon-trees, which he had already seen. Perrottet says,[[MI]] that he had seen monkey-bread fruit trees, which had a diameter of about thirty-two feet, with a height of only from seventy to eighty-five feet. The same dimensions had been given by Adanson in his voyage, 1748. The largest trunks of the monkey bread-fruit trees, which he himself saw, in 1749, some on one of the small Magdalena islands near Cape de Verd, and others at the mouth of the Senegal, were from 26 to nearly 29 feet in diameter, with a height of little more than 70 feet, and a top measuring upwards of 180 feet across. Adanson, however, makes the remark that other travellers had found trunks having a diameter of about 32 feet.[[MJ]] French and Dutch sailors had carved their names on the trunks in characters six inches in length. One of these inscriptions was of the fifteenth century,[[MK]] while all the others were of the sixteenth. From the depth of the cuts, which are covered with new layers of wood,[[ML]] and from a comparison of the thickness of trunks, whose various ages were known, Adanson computed the age of trees having a diameter of 32 feet at 5150 years.[[MM]] He however cautiously subjoins the following remarks, in a quaint mode of spelling which I do not alter: “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 adorned the entrance of a hollow Baobab with carvings cut out of wood still green. The inner cavity serves as a place of general meeting in which the community debate on their interests. This hall reminds us of the hollow (specus) in the interior of a plantain in Lycia, in which the Roman ex-consul, Lucinius Mutianus, entertained twenty-one guests. Pliny (xii. 3) gives to a cavity of this kind the somewhat ample breadth of eighty Roman feet. The Baobab was seen by René Caillié in the valley of the Niger near Jenne, by Cailliaud in Nubia, and by Wilhelm Peters along the whole eastern coast of Africa, where this tree, which is called Mulapa, i.e. Nlapa-tree, or more correctly muti-nlapa, advances as far as Lourenzo Marques, almost to 26° south lat. The oldest and thickest trunks seen by Peters “measured from 60 to 75 feet in circumference.” Although Cadamosto observed, in the fifteenth century, eminentia non quadrat magnitudini; and although Golberry[[MN]] found, in the “Vallée des deux Gagnacks,” trunks only 64 feet in height whose diameter was 36 feet, this disproportion between thickness and height must not be assumed to be general. “Very old trees,” says the learned traveller, Peters, “lose their crowns by gradual decay, while they continue to increase in circumference. On the eastern coast of Africa one not unfrequently meets with trees having a diameter of more than 10 feet which reach the height of nearly 70 feet.”
While therefore the bold calculations of Adanson and Perrottet assign to the Adansonias measured by them, an age of 5150 or even 6000 years, which would make them coeval with the builders of the Pyramids, or even with Menes, and would place them in an epoch when the Southern Cross was still visible in Northern Germany;[[MO]] the more certain estimations yielded by annular rings, and by the relation found to exist between the thickness of the layer of wood and the duration of growth, give us, on the other hand, shorter periods for our temperate northern zone. Decandolle finds that of all European species of trees, the yew attains the greatest age; and according to his calculations, 30 centuries must be assigned as the age of the Taxus baccata of Braburn in Kent, from 25 to 26 to the Scotch yew of Fortingal, and 14½ and 12 respectively to those of Crowhurst in Surrey and Ripon (Fountains Abbey) in Yorkshire.[[MP]] Endlicher remarks that “another yew-tree in the churchyard of Grasford, North Wales, which measures more than 50 feet in girth below the branches, is more than 1400 years old, whilst one in Derbyshire is estimated at 2096 years. In Lithuania linden trees have been felled which measured 87 feet round, and in which 815 annular rings have been counted.”[[MQ]] In the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere some species of the Eucalyptus attain an enormous girth, and as they at the same time attain a height of nearly 250 feet, they afford a singular contrast to our yew trees, which are colossal only in thickness. Mr. Backhouse found in Emu Bay, on the shore of Van Diemen’s Land, Eucalyptus trunks which, with a circumference of 70 feet at the base, measured as much as 50 feet at a little more than 5 feet from the ground.[[MR]]
It was not Malpighi, as has been generally asserted, but the intellectual Michel Montaigne, who had the merit of first showing, in 1581, in his Voyage en Italie, the relation that exists between the annual rings and the age of the tree.[[MS]] An intelligent artisan, engaged in the preparation of astronomical instruments, first drew Montaigne’s attention to the significance of the annual rings, asserting that the part of the trunk directed towards the north had narrower rings. Jean Jacques Rousseau entertained the same opinion; and his Emile, when he loses himself in the forest, is made to direct his course in accordance with the deposition of the layers of wood. Recent phyto-anatomical observations[[MT]] teach us, however, that the acceleration of vegetation as well as the remission of growth, and the varying production of the circles of the ligneous bundles (annual deposits) from the cambium cells, depend on other influences than position with respect to the quarter of the heavens.
Trees which in the case of some examples attain a diameter of more than 20 feet, and an age of many centuries, belong to very different natural families. We may here instance Baobabs, Dragon trees, various species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium distichum. (Rich.,) Pinus Lambertiana. (Douglasii,) Hymenæa Courbaril, Cæsalpinieæ, Bombax, Swietenia Mahagoni, the Banyan tree (Ficus religiosa), Liriodendron tulipifera(?), Platanus orientalis, and our Lindens, Oaks, and Yews. The celebrated Taxodium distichon, the Ahuahuete of the Mexicans (Cupressus disticha, Linn., Schubertia disticha, Mirbel), of Santa Maria del Tule, in the State of Oaxaca, has not a diameter of 60 feet, as stated by Decandolle, but exactly 40½ feet.[[MU]] The two beautiful Ahuahuetes which I have frequently seen at Chapoltepec (growing in what was probably once a garden or pleasure ground of Montezuma) measure, according to the instructive account in Burkardt’s travels (bd. i. s. 268) only 36 and 38 feet in circumference, and not in diameter, as has often been erroneously maintained. The Buddhists of Ceylon venerate the colossal trunk of the sacred fig-tree of Anurahdepura. The Banyan, which takes root by its branches, often attains a thickness of 30 feet, and forms, as Onesicritus truly expresses himself, a leafy roof resembling a many-pillared tent.[[MV]] On the Bombax Ceiba see early notices from the time of Columbus in Bembo.[[MW]]
Among those oak trees which have been very accurately measured, the largest in Europe is undoubtedly the one near Saintes on the road to Cozes, in the Department de la Charente inférieure. This tree, which has an elevation of 64 feet, measures very nearly 30 feet in diameter near the ground, while 5 feet higher up it is nearly 23 feet, and where the main branches begin more than 6 feet. A little room, from 10 feet 8 inches to 12 feet 9 inches in width and 9 feet 7 inches in height, has been cleared in the dead part of the trunk, and a semi-circular bench cut within it from the green wood. A window gives light to the interior, and hence the walls of this little room, which is closed by a door, are gracefully clothed with ferns and lichens. From the size of a small piece of wood that had been cut out over the door, and in which two hundred ligneous rings were counted, the age of the oak of Saintes must be estimated at 1800 or 2000 years.[[MX]]
With respect to the rose-tree (Rosa canina) reputed to be a thousand years old, which grows in the crypt of the Cathedral of Hildesheim, I learn from accurate information, based on authentic records, for which I am indebted to the kindness of the Stadtgerichts-Assessor Römer, that the main stem only has an age of eight hundred years. A legend connects this rose-tree with a vow of the first founder of the cathedral, Louis the Pious; and a document of the eleventh century says, “that when Bishop Hezilo rebuilt the cathedral, which had been burnt down, he enclosed the roots of the rose-tree within a vault still remaining, raised on the latter the walls of the crypt, which was re-consecrated in 1061, and spread the branches of the rose-tree over its sides.” The stem, still living, is nearly 27 feet in height, and only 2 inches thick, and spreads across a width of 82 feet over the outer wall of the eastern crypt. It is undoubtedly of very considerable antiquity, and well worthy of the renown it has so long enjoyed throughout Germany.