To the dragon-trees, which, notwithstanding the gigantic development of their closed vascular bundles, must be classed, in respect to their floral parts, in the same natural family as Asparagus and the garden onion, belongs the Adansonia, (the monkey bread-tree, _Baobab_), undoubtedly among the largest and most ancient inhabitants of our planet. In the earliest voyages of discovery made by Catalans and Portuguese, the sailors were accustomed to carve their names on these two species of trees; not always from a mere wish of perpetuating their memory, but also as “marcos,” or signs of possession, and of the rights which nations assume in virtue of first discovery. The Portuguese mariners often selected for carving on the trees, as a “marco,” or mark of possession, the elegant French motto _talent de bien faire_, so frequently employed by the Infante Don Henrique, the Discoverer. Thus Manuel de Faria y Sousa says expressly;[MD] “Era uso de los primeros Navegantes de dexar inscrito el motto del Infante, _talent de bien faire_, en la corteza de los arboles.”[ME] (It was the custom of the early navigators to inscribe the motto of the Infante in the bark of the trees.) The above-named motto, cut on the bark of two trees by Portuguese navigators in the year 1435, and therefore twenty-eight years before the death of the Infante Don Henrique, Duke of Viseo, is singularly connected, in the history of discoveries, with the discussions that have arisen from a comparison of Vespucci’s fourth voyage with that of Gonzalo Coelho (1503). Vespucci relates, that the Admiral’s ship of Coelho’s squadron was wrecked on an island which was sometimes supposed to be that of San Fernando Noronha; sometimes, Peñedo de San Pedro; and sometimes, the problematical island of St. Matthew. The last-named island was discovered on the 15th of October, 1525, by Garcia Jofre de Loaysa in 2½ south lat., in the meridian of Cape Palmas, and almost in the Gulf of Guinea. He remained there eighteen days at anchor, and found crosses, orange-trees that had become wild, and two trunks of trees having inscriptions that bore the date of ninety years back.[MF] I have in another place,[MG] in an inquiry regarding the trustworthiness of Amerigo Vespucci, more fully considered this problem.