The Baobab Tree | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 12, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 11.

The Baobab Tree.

THE queerest of trees must be the baobab, or monkey bread. It grows to the height of forty feet, but its girth is entirely out of proportion to its height, some trees being thirty feet in diameter. An old baobab in Africa is then more like a whole forest than a single tree. Their age is incalculable. Humboldt considers them as "the oldest living organic monuments of our planet." Some trees are believed to be 5,000 years old. You can cut a good-sized room into the trunk of a baobab, with comfortable accommodations for thirty men, and the tree lives on and flourishes. It produces a fruit about a foot long, which is edible. As an example of slow growth in England, a baobab at Kew, though more than eighty years old, has only attained a height of four and a half feet. A kindred species to the African baobab grows in Australia. They have been measured, being thirty feet high, with a girth of eighty-five feet.

THAT man who does not know those things which are of necessity for him to know, is but an ignorant man, whatever he may know besides.—Archbishop Tillotson.