‘Compared with it, the Oak of Ellerslie is but a sapling, and the Conqueror’s Oak in Windsor Forest barely numbers half its years. The yew trees of Fountains Abbey are believed to have flourished there 1,200 years ago; the olives in the Garden of Gethsemane were full-grown when the Saracens were expelled from Jerusalem, and the cypress of Somma in Lombardy is said to have been a tree in the time of Julius Cæsar. Yet the Bo-tree is older than the oldest of these by a century, and would almost seem to verify the prophecy pronounced when it was planted, that it would ‘flourish and be green for ever.’[13] Although far inferior to these wonders of the vegetable world in amplitude of growth, yet the Teak tree, or Indian oak (_Tectona grandis_), far surpasses them in value, as the ship-worm in the water, and the termite on land, equally refrain from attacking its close-grained strongly scented wood; and no timber equals it for ship-building purposes. It grows wild over a great part of British India; in the mountainous districts along the Malabar coast, in Guzerat, the valley of the Nerbuddah, in Tenasserim and Pegu. Unlike the oak and fir forests of Europe, where large spaces of ground are covered by a single species, the teak forests of India are composed of a great variety of trees, among which the teak itself does not even predominate. After a long neglect, which, in some parts, had almost caused its total extirpation, Government has at length taken steps for its more effectual protection, and appointed experienced foresters to watch over this invaluable tree. Since 1843, millions of young plants have been raised from seeds, but unfortunately the teak is of as slow growth as our oak, and many years will still be necessary to repair the ruinous improvidence of the past. On turning our attention to America we find that Nature, delighting in infinite varieties of development, and disdaining a servile copy of what she had elsewhere formed, covers the earth with new and no less remarkable forms of vegetation. Thus, while in Africa the baobab attracts the traveller’s attention by its colossal size and peculiarity of growth, the gigantic Ceiba (_Bombax Ceiba_), belonging to the same family of plants, raises his astonishment in the forests of Yucatan. Like the baobab, this noble tree rises only to a moderate height of sixty feet, but its trunk swells to such dimensions that fifteen men are hardly able to span it, while a thousand may easily screen themselves under its canopy from the scorching sun. The leaves fall off in January; and then at the end of every branch bunches of large, glossy, purple-red flowers make their appearance, affording, as one may well imagine, a magnificent sight.