The Bombax, or silk-cotton tree (Eriodendrum anfractuosum), the Arab Díbáj and the Kisawahili Msufi, common in East as in West Africa, affords a fibre usually considered too short and brittle for weaving, but I have seen Surat cotton very nearly as bad. The contents of the pericarp have been used for pillow stuffings: the only result (_dicunt_) was a remarkable plague of pediculi. The Kewra, or frankincense tree of India, abounds. The red beans of the Abrus Precatorius are used by the poor and by the wild people as ornaments; even the mixed Luso-African race of Annobom will wear huge strings of this fruit, our original ‘carat.’ The soft-wooded Baobab, Mbuyu or calabash tree (Adansonia digitata), grows rapidly to a large size upon the Island as upon the Eastern and Western coasts. It is a tree of many uses. The trunk, often girthing 40 feet, forms the water-tank, the trough, the fisherman’s Monoxyle; the fibrous bark is converted into cloth, whose tough network is valued by the natives; the fruit pulp is eaten, and the dried shells serve as Buyu, or gourds. I have repeatedly alluded to this tree in the Lake Regions of Central Africa, and I shall offer other notices of it in the following pages. Of late the Mbuyu or Baobab has brought itself into notice as affording a material more valuable for paper than straw, esparto or wood pulp, and its superiority to other African basts, has been acknowledged in England.[61] The Mpingo (Dalbergia Melanoxylum) gives a purple timber, not a little like rosewood. The ‘African oak,’ a species of teak, is reported to exist; but this tree does not extend far north of Mozambique. The ‘P’hun’ is a stately growth, whose noble shaft, often 80 feet high, springs without knot or branch, till its head expands into a mighty parachute. It is more ornamental than useful,—the wood is soft, full of sap, like our summer timber, and subject to white ants. In these hot, wet, and windy tropical regions some trees, especially those without gum or resinous sap, grow too fast, and are liable to rot, whilst others take many years to mature, and are almost unmanageably hard and heavy. Hence we have had timber-cutting establishments set up by our Government at a large expense in the Brazil and in West Africa, but the produce never paid the voyage to England.