It was not Malpighi, as has been generally asserted, but the intellectual Michel Montaigne, who had the merit of first showing, in 1581, in his _Voyage en Italie_, the relation that exists between the annual rings and the age of the tree.[MS] An intelligent artisan, engaged in the preparation of astronomical instruments, first drew Montaigne’s attention to the significance of the annual rings, asserting that the part of the trunk directed towards the north had narrower rings. Jean Jacques Rousseau entertained the same opinion; and his Emile, when he loses himself in the forest, is made to direct his course in accordance with the deposition of the layers of wood. Recent phyto-anatomical observations[MT] teach us, however, that the acceleration of vegetation as well as the remission of growth, and the varying production of the circles of the ligneous bundles (annual deposits) from the cambium cells, depend on other influences than position with respect to the quarter of the heavens. Trees which in the case of some examples attain a diameter of more than 20 feet, and an age of many centuries, belong to very different natural families. We may here instance Baobabs, Dragon trees, various species of Eucalyptus, Taxodium distichum. (Rich.,) Pinus Lambertiana. (Douglasii,) Hymenæa Courbaril, Cæsalpinieæ, Bombax, Swietenia Mahagoni, the Banyan tree (_Ficus religiosa_), Liriodendron tulipifera(?), Platanus orientalis, and our Lindens, Oaks, and Yews. The celebrated Taxodium distichon, the Ahuahuete of the Mexicans (_Cupressus disticha_, Linn., _Schubertia disticha_, Mirbel), of Santa Maria del Tule, in the State of Oaxaca, has not a diameter of 60 feet, as stated by Decandolle, but exactly 40½ feet.[MU] The two beautiful Ahuahuetes which I have frequently seen at Chapoltepec (growing in what was probably once a garden or pleasure ground of Montezuma) measure, according to the instructive account in Burkardt’s travels (bd. i. s. 268) only 36 and 38 feet in circumference, and not in diameter, as has often been erroneously maintained. The Buddhists of Ceylon venerate the colossal trunk of the sacred fig-tree of Anurahdepura. The Banyan, which takes root by its branches, often attains a thickness of 30 feet, and forms, as Onesicritus truly expresses himself, a leafy roof resembling a many-pillared tent.[MV] On the Bombax Ceiba see early notices from the time of Columbus in Bembo.[MW]