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African Calabash Tree

branches extend almost horizontally, and as they are about sixty feet in length, their own weight bends their extremities to the ground, and thus form an hemispherical mass of ver dure of about 120 or 130 feet diameter. The roots extend as far as the branches: that in the middle forms a pivot, which penetrates a great way into the earth; the rest spread near the surface. The flowers are in proportion to the size of the tree, and are followed by an oblong pointed fruit, ten inches long, five or six broad, and covered with a kind of greenish down, under which is a ligneous rind, hard, and almost black, marked with rays, which divide it lengthwise into sides. It is very common in Senegal, and the Cape de Verd islands; and is found 100 leagues up the country, at Gulam, and upon the sea-coast as far as Sierra Leone. The age of this tree is no less remarkable than its enormous size. Mr. Adanson relates, that, in a botanical excursion to the Magdalen Islands, he discovered some calabash-trees, from five to six feet diameter, on the bark of which were engraved, or cut to a considerable depth, a number of European names. Two of these names, which he was at the trouble to repair, were dated, one in the fourteenth, the other in the fifteenth century. The inscribed trees, mentioned by this ingenious Frenchman, had been seen in 1555, almost two centuries before, by Thevet, who mentions them in his relation of his Voyage to Terra Antarctia, or Australis. Adanson saw them in 1749. The virtues and uses of this tree and its fruits are various. The negroes of Senegal dry the bark and aves in the shaded air, and then reduce them to powder, which is of a pretty good green colour. This powder they preserve in bags of linen or cotton, and call it lillo. They use it every day, putting three or four pinches of it into a mess, whatever it happens to be, as we do pepper and salt: but their view is, not to give a relish to their food, but to preserve a perpetual and plentiful perspiration, and to attemper the too great heat of the blood; purposes to which it certainly answers, as several Europeans have proved by repeated experiments; preserving themselves from the epidemic fever, which, in that country, is as fatal to them as the plague, and generally rages during the months of September and October: when the rains have suddenly ceased, the sun exhales the water left by them on the ground, and fills the air with a noxious vapour. M. Adanson, in the critical season, made a light ptisan of the leaves of the baobal, which he had gathered in the August of the preceding year, and had dried in the shade; and drank constantly about a pint of it every morning, either before or after breakfast, and the same quantity of it every evening, after the heat of the sun began to abate: he also took the same quantity in the middle of the 1