Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/95

 *[Footnote: *ance 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 Dracænas 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. Dracæna borealis of Aiton is a true Convallaria, and has all the "habitus" of that genus. (Humboldt, Rel. hist. T. i. p. 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 Cordillères et Monumens des Peuples indigènes de l'Amérique, 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 Dépôt de la Marine, and from which I borrowed important astronomically-determined geographical, as well as barometric and trigonometric notices. (Rel. hist. T. i. p. 282.) The measurement of the dragon-tree of the Villa Franqui was made on Borda's first voyage with Pingré, in 1771; not in his second voyage, in 1776, with Varela. It is affirmed that in the early 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.]