The trunks of these trees are covered with very odoriferous plants of vanilla, which, in general, flower only in the month of April.--We were here again struck with those ligneous excrescenses, which in the form of ridges, or ribs, augment, in so extraordinary a manner, and as far as twenty feet above the ground, the thickness of the trunk of the fig trees of America. I found trees twenty-two feet and a half in diameter near the roots.--These ligneous ridges sometimes separate from the trunk at a height of eight feet, and are transformed into cylindrical roots two feet thick. The tree looks as if it were supported by buttresses. This scaffolding, however, does not penetrate very deep into the earth. The lateral roots wind at the surface of the ground, and when at twenty feet distance from the trunk, they are cut with the hatchet, we see the milky juice of the fig tree gush out, which, when deprived of the vital influence of the organs of the tree, is altered and coagulates. What a wonderful combination of cells and vessels exist in these vegetable masses; in these gigantic trees of the torrid zone, which, without interruption, perhaps during a thousand years, prepare nutritious fluids, raise them to the height of 180 feet, convey them down again to the ground, and conceal beneath a rough and hard bark, under the inanimate layers of ligneous matter, all the movements of organic life! _The Cow Tree._ "Amid the great number of curious phenomena which have presented themselves to me in the course of my travels, I confess there are few that have so powerfully affected my imagination, as the aspect of the cow tree.