The oldest description of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata) is that of the Venetian, Aloysius Cadamosto. (whose real name was Alvise da Ca da Mosto) in 1454. He found at the mouth of the Senegal. (where he joined Antoniotto Usodimare), trunks, whose circumference he estimated at 17 fathoms, or 112 feet.[MH] He might have compared them to dragon-trees, which he had already seen. Perrottet says,[MI] that he had seen monkey-bread fruit trees, which had a diameter of about thirty-two feet, with a height of only from seventy to eighty-five feet. The same dimensions had been given by Adanson in his voyage, 1748. The largest trunks of the monkey bread-fruit trees, which he himself saw, in 1749, some on one of the small Magdalena islands near Cape de Verd, and others at the mouth of the Senegal, were from 26 to nearly 29 feet in diameter, with a height of little more than 70 feet, and a top measuring upwards of 180 feet across. Adanson, however, makes the remark that other travellers had found trunks having a diameter of about 32 feet.[MJ] French and Dutch sailors had carved their names on the trunks in characters six inches in length. One of these inscriptions was of the fifteenth century,[MK] while all the others were of the sixteenth. From the depth of the cuts, which are covered with new layers of wood,[ML] and from a comparison of the thickness of trunks, whose various ages were known, Adanson computed the age of trees having a diameter of 32 feet at 5150 years.[MM] He however cautiously subjoins the following remarks, in a quaint mode of spelling which I do not alter: “le calcul de l’aje de chake couche n’a pas d’exactitude géometrike.” In the village of Grand Galarques, also in Senegambia, the negroes have adorned the entrance of a hollow Baobab with carvings cut out of wood still green. The inner cavity serves as a place of general meeting in which the community debate on their interests. This hall reminds us of the hollow (specus) in the interior of a plantain in Lycia, in which the Roman ex-consul, Lucinius Mutianus, entertained twenty-one guests. Pliny (xii. 3) gives to a cavity of this kind the somewhat ample breadth of eighty Roman feet. The Baobab was seen by René Caillié in the valley of the Niger near Jenne, by Cailliaud in Nubia, and by Wilhelm Peters along the whole eastern coast of Africa, where this tree, which is called _Mulapa_, _i.e._ _Nlapa-tree_, or more correctly _muti-nlapa_, advances as far as Lourenzo Marques, almost to 26° south lat. The oldest and thickest trunks seen by Peters “measured from 60 to 75 feet in circumference.” Although Cadamosto observed, in the fifteenth century, _eminentia non quadrat magnitudini_; and although Golberry[MN] found, in the “Vallée des deux Gagnacks,” trunks only 64 feet in height whose diameter was 36 feet, this disproportion between thickness and height must not be assumed to be general. “Very old