Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Yew,
Chestnut, Oak, Plane-Tree, Deciduous Cypress, Bombax, Mimosa,
Caesalpina, Hymenaea, And Dracaena, Appear To Me To Be The Plants
Which, In Different Climates, Present Specimens Of The Most
Extraordinary Growth.
An oak, discovered together with some Gallic
helmets in 1809, in the turf pits of the department of the Somme,
near the village of Yseux, seven leagues from Abbeville, was about
the same size as the dragon-tree of Orotava.
According to a memoir
by M. Traullee, the trunk of this oak was 14 feet in diameter.)
That in M. Franqui's garden still bears every year both flowers and
fruit. Its aspect forcibly exemplifies "that eternal youth of
nature," which is an inexhaustible source of motion and of life.
The dracaena, which is seen only in cultivated spots in the Canary
Islands, at Madeira, and Porto Santo, presents a curious phenomenon
with respect to the migration of plants. It has never been found in
a wild state on the continent of Africa. The East Indies is its
real country. How has this tree been transplanted to Teneriffe,
where it is by no means common? Does its existence prove, that, at
some very distant period, the Guanches had connexions with other
nations originally from Asia?* (* The form of the dragon-tree is
exhibited in several species of the genus Dracaena, at the Cape of
Good Hope, in China, and in New Zealand. But in New Zealand it is
superseded by the form of the yucca; for the Dracaena borealis of
Aiton is a Convallaria, of which it has all the appearance.
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