Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/790

766 of the Hesperides; for the ancients tried to make old Atlas and his daughters inhabitants of our islands. To moderns this tree is chiefly remarkable on account of its exceedingly slow growth and the very great age which it attains. A specimen at Orotava was estimated by Humboldt and others to be from six thousand to ten thousand years old. This individual was hollow, and had been an object of veneration to the Guanchees since immemorial times; their Spanish conquerors turned it into a chapel. It was blown down in 1868, but



numerous existing trees of much smaller size are still held to have an age of from two thousand to four thousand years.

There is an oak which seems to be thoroughly naturalized in a few places, and a silver-leaved poplar has monopolized whole valley sides. Near the aqueducts and brooks buttercups, vetches, flax, clover, catchfly, sweet clover, sorrel, and plantago abound. In the drier barrancos grows an acacia with globular, orange-colored balls of sweet-scented flowers, also a native sage and the tamarisk tree, with an occasional sturdy castor-oil plant. Very rarely one is fortunate enough to meet with a specimen of a species of juniper formerly forming great woods, now almost extinct on the islands. The cultivated fields and the roadsides have a flora of their own. Among the beans planted as fodder, the white-flowered sweet pea grows luxuriantly, sweetening the air. Vetches, geraniums, morning-glories,