Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/102

 *[Footnote: *taigne 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 influences which are wholly distinct from the quarter of the heavens towards which one side of the annual rings is turned. (Kunth, Lehrbuch der 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, Dragon-trees, some species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium disticum (Rich.), Pinus Lambertiana (Douglas), Hymenæa courbaril, Cæsalpinieæ, Bombax, Swietenia mahagoni, the Banyan tree (Ficus religiosa), Liriodendron tulipifera? 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 (40-1/2 English) feet. (Mühlenpfordt, Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik Mexico, Bd. i. S. 153.) The two fine Ahuahuetes near Chapoltepec,]*