Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/99

 *[Footnote: 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 shewed 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 Sènegal, 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 géometrike." 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 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. 8) assigns to such a cavity in a hollow tree the somewhat large allowance of a breadth of eighty Roman feet. The Baobab was seen by Réné Caillié in the Valley of the Niger near Jenne, by Caillaud in Nubia, and by Wilhelm Peters along the whole eastern coast of Africa (where]*