OCR Text |
Show 284 PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. ground, Le Dru made it nearly 79 English feet. Sir George Staunton found the diameter still as much as 12 feet at the height of 10 feet above the ground. The height of the tree is not much above 69 English feet. According to tradition, this tree was venerated by the Guanches (as was the ash-tree of Ephesus by the Greeks, or as the Lydian plane-tree which Xerxes decked with ornaments, and the sacred Banyan-tree of Ceylon), and at the time <if the first expedition of the Betbencourts in 1402, it was already as thick and as hollow as it now is. Remembering that the Dracrena grows extremely slowly, we are led to infer the high antiquity of the tree of Orotava. Bertbolet, in his description of Teneriffe, says, "En comparant les jeunes Dragonniers, voisins de l'arbre gigantesque, les calculs qu'on fait sur l'age de cc dernier effraient l'imagination." (Nova Acta Acad. Leop. Carol. Naturre Curiosorum, t. xiii. 1827, p. 781.) The dragon-tree has been cultivated in the Canaries, and in Madeira and Porto Santo, from the earliest times; and an accurate observer, Leopold von Buch, bas even found it wild in Teneriffe, near Igueste. Its original country, therefore, is not India, as had long been believed; nor does its appearance in the Canaries contradict the opinion of those who regard the Guanches as having been an isolated Atlantic nation without intercourse with African or Asiatic nations. The form of the Dracrenas is repeated at the southern extremity of Africa, in the Isle of Bourbon, and in New Zealand. In all these distant regions species of the genus in question are found, but none have been met with in the New Continent, where its form is replaced by that of the Yucca. Dracrena borealis. of Aiton is a true Convallaria, and has all the "habitus" of that genus. (Humboldt, Rel. hist. t. i. pp. 118 and 639.) I have given a representation of the dragon-tree of Orotava, taken from a drawing made by F. d'Ozonne in 1776, in the last plate of the Picturesque Atlas of my American journey. (Vues des Cordilleres et Monumens des Peuples indigenes de l' Amerique, pl. lxix.) I found d'Ozonne's drawing among the manuscripts left by the celebrated Borda, in the still unprinted travelling journal entrusted to me by the Depot de la Marine, and from which I borrowed important astronomically determined geographical, as well as barometic and trigonometric, notices. (Rel. hist. t. i. p. 282.) The measurement of the dragon-tree of |