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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 287 Senegal, trunk 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 Senegambie" (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 Verde, and in the vicinity of the mouth of the Senegal River, were from 26 to 28t 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 showed 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 Senegal, 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 geometrike." 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 the 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. 3) assigns to such a cavity in a hollow tree the some what large allowance of a breadth of eighty Roman feet. The Baobab was seen by Rene Caillie 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, |
