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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 285 the Villa Franqui was made on Borda's first voyage with Pingre, in 1771; not in his second voyage, in 1776, with Varela. It is affirmed that in the earlier times of the Norman and Spanish Conquests, in the 15th century, Mass was said at a small altar erected in the hollow trunk of the tree. Unfortunately, the dragon-tree of Orotava lost one side of its top in the storm of the 21st of July, 1819. There is a fine and large English copperplate engraving which represents the present state of the tree with remarkable truth to nature. The monumental character of these colossal living vegetable forms, and the kind of reverence which has been felt for them among all nations, have occasioned in modern times the bestowal of greater care in the numerical determination of their age and the size of their trunks. The results of these inquiries have led the author of the important treatise, "De la longevite des Arbres," the elder Decandolle, Endlicher, Unger, and other able botanists, to consider it not improbable that the age of several individual trees which are still alive, goes back to the earliest historical periods, if not of Egypt, at least of Greece and Italy. It is said in the Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve, 1831, t. lxvii. p. 50: "Plusieurs exemples semblent confirmer l'idee qu'il existe encore sur le globe des arbres d'une antiquite prodigieuse, et peut-etre temoins de ses dernieres revolutions physiques. Lorsqu' on regarde un arbre comme un agregat d'autant d'individus sondes ensemble qu'il s'est developpe de bourgeons a sa surface, on ne peut pas s' etonner si, de nouveaux bourgeons s'ajoutant sans cesse aux anciens, l'agregat qui en resulte n'a point de terme necessaire a son existence." In the same manner Agardh says : " If in trees there are produced in each solar year new parts, so that the older hardened parts are replaced by new ones capable of conducting sap, we see hen:in a type of growth limited only by external causes." He ascribes the shortness of the life .of herbs, or of such plants as are not trees, "to the preponderance of the production of fiQ";ers and fruit over the formation of leaves." Unfruitfulness is to a plant a prolongation of life. Endlicher cites the example of a plant of Medicago sativa, var. (3 versicolor, which, bearing no fruit, lived eighty years. (Grundziige der Botanik, 1843, s. 1003.) With the dragon trees, which, notwithstanding the gigantic de- |
