OCR Text |
Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 289 mous girth, and as they also reach to a great stature (above 230 Paris, 245 Engli h, 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 l\Iontaigne, 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 J ussieu, Cours elementaire 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 infl.uences which are wholly distinct from the quarter of the heavens towards which one side of the annual rings is turned. (Kunth, Lehrbuch dcr 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, Dragontrees, some species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium disticum (Rich.), Pinus Lambertiana (Douglas), Hymenrea courbaril, Cresalpiniere, Bombax, Swietenia mahogoni, the Banyan tree (Ficus religiosa), Liriodendron trrlipifera? 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 (40t English) feet. (Miihlenpfordt, V ersuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik 25 |