ETHIOPIAN SOUR-GOURD, MONKIES-BREAD, or AFRICAN CALABASH-TREE, a genus of the monodelphia order, belonging to the polyandra class of plants; the characters of which are: The calyx is a perianthium one-leaved, half five-cleft, cup-form, (the divisions revolute), deciduous: The corolla consists of five petals, roundish, nerved, revolute, growing reciprocally with the claws and stamens: The filaments have numerous filaments, congealed beneath into a tube, and crowning it, expanding horizontally; the anther kidney-form, incumbent: The pistillum has an egged germ; the stylus very long, tubular, variably intorted; the stigmata numerous (10) prismatic, villous, ray-expanded: The pericarpium is an oval capsule, woody, not gaping, 10-celled, with farinaceous pulp, the partitions membranous: The seeds are numerous, kidney-shaped, rather bony, and involved in a friable pulp.

There is at present but one known species belonging to this genus, the BAOBAB, which is perhaps the largest production of the whole vegetable kingdom. It is a native of Africa.

The trunk is not above 12 or 15 feet high, but from 65 to 78 feet round. The lowest branches extend almost horizontally; and as they are about 60 feet in length, their own weight bends their extremities to the ground, and thus form a hemispherical mass of verdure of about 120 or 130 feet diameter. The roots extend as far as the branches; that in the middle forms a pivot, which penetrates a great way into the earth; the rest spread near the surface. The flowers are in proportion to the size of the tree; and are followed by an oblong fruit, pointed at both ends, about 10 inches long, five or six broad, and covered with a kind of greenish down, under which is a ligneous rind, hard and almost black, marked with rays which divide it lengthwise into sides. The fruit hangs to the tree by a pedicle two feet long and an inch diameter. It contains a whitish spongy juicy substance; with seeds of a brown colour, and shaped like a kidney-bean. The bark of this tree is nearly an inch thick, of an ash-coloured grey, greasy to the touch, bright, and very smooth: the outside is covered with a kind of varnish; and the inside is green, speckled with red. The wood is white, and very soft; the first shoots of the year are green and downy.

The leaves of the young plants are entire, of an oblong form, about four or five inches long, and almost three broad towards the top, having several veins running from the middle rib; they are of a lucid green colour. As the plants advance in height, the leaves alter, and are divided into three parts, and afterwards into five lobes, which spread out in the shape of a hand. The tree sheds its leaves in November, and new ones begin to appear in June. It flowers in July, and the fruit ripens in October and November. It is very common in Senegal, and the Cape de Verd islands; and is found 100 leagues up the country at Gualam, and upon the sea-coast as far as Sierra Leone.

The age of this tree is perhaps no less remarkable than its enormous size. Mr Adanson relates, that in a botanical excursion to the Magdalene Islands, in the neighbourhood of Gorce, he discovered some calabash-trees, from five to six feet diameter, on the bark of which were engraved or cut to a considerable depth a number of European names. Two of these names, which he was at the trouble to repair, were dated one the 14th, the other the 15th century. The letters were about six inches long, but in breadth they occupied a very small part only of the circumference of the trunk: from whence he concluded they had not been cut when these trees were young. These inscriptions, however, he thinks sufficient to determine pretty nearly the age which these calabash-trees may attain; for even supposing that those in question were cut in their early years, and that trees grew to the diameter of six feet in two centuries, as the engraved letters evince, how many centuries must be requisite to give them a diameter of 25 feet, which perhaps is not the last term of their growth! The inscribed trees mentioned by this ingenious Frenchman had been seen in 1555, almost two centuries before, by Thivet, who mentions them in the relation of his voyage to Terra Antartica or Australis. Adanson saw them in 1749.

The virtues and uses of this tree and its fruit are various. The negroes of Senegal dry the bark and leaves in the shade air; and then reduce them to powder, which is of a pretty good green colour. This powder they prefer in bags of linen or cotton, and call it lilos. They use it every day, putting two or three pinches of it into a mess, whatever it happens to be, as we do pepper and salt: but their view is, not to give a relish to their food, but to preserve a perpetual and plentiful perspiration, and to attenuate the too great heat of the blood; purposes which it certainly answers, as several Europeans have proved by repeated experiments, preserving themselves from the epidemic fever, which, in that country, destroys Europeans like the plague, and generally rages during the months of September and October, when the rains having suddenly ceased, the sun exhales the water left by them upon the ground, and fills the air with a noxious vapour. M. Adanson, in that critical season, made a light pith of the leaves of the baobab, which he had gathered in the August of the preceding year, and had dried in the shade; and drank constantly about a pint of it every morning, either before or after breakfast, and the same quantity of it every evening after the heat of the sun began to abate; he also sometimes took the same quantity in the middle of the day, but this was only when he felt some symptoms of an approaching fever. By this precaution he preserved himself, during the five years he resided at Senegal, from the diarrhoea and fever, which are so fatal there. Adansonia and which are, however, the only dangerous diseases of the place; and other officers suffered very severely, only one excepted, upon whom M. Adanson prevailed to use this remedy, which for its simplicity was despised by the rest. This piflar alone also prevents that heat of urine which is common in these parts, from the month of July to November, provided the person abstains from wine.

The fruit is not less useful than the leaves and the bark. The pulp that envelopes the seeds has an agreeable acid taste, and is eaten for pleasure: it is also dried and powdered, and thus used medicinally in petitential fevers, the dysentery, and bloody flux; the dose is a drachm, palied through a fine sieve, taken either in common water, or in an infusion of the plantain. This powder is brought into Europe under the name of *terra sigillata lemnis*. The woody bark of the fruit, and the fruit itself when spoiled, helps to supply the negroes with an excellent soap, which they make by drawing a ley from the ashes, and boiling it with palm-oil that begins to be rancid.

The trunks of such of these trees as are decayed, the negroes hollow out into burying places for their poets, musicians, buffoons: persons of these characters they esteem greatly while they live, supposing them to derive their superior talents from sorcery or commerce with demons; but they regard their bodies with a kind of horror when dead, and will not give them burial in the usual manner, neither suffering them to be put into the ground, nor thrown into the sea or any river, because they imagine that the water would not then nourish the fish, nor the earth produce its fruits. The bodies shut up in these trunks become perfectly dry without rotting, and form a kind of mummies without the help of embalming.

The baobab is very distinct from the calabash-tree of America, with which it has been confounded by father Labat. See *Crescentia*.

**Culture.** This tree is propagated from seeds, which are brought from the countries where they grow naturally. Being natives only of hot climates, the plants will not thrive in the open air in Britain, even in summer. The seeds are therefore to be sown in pots, and plunged into a hot-bed, where the plants will appear in about six weeks, and in a short time after be fit to transplant. They must then be planted each in a separate pot, in light sandy earth, and plunged into a hot-bed, shading them until they have taken root; after which they should have fresh air admitted every day in warm weather: but must be sparingly watered, as being apt to rot. They grow quickly for two or three years, but afterwards make little progress; the lower part of the stem then begins to fivel, and put out lateral branches, inclining to a horizontal position, and covered with a light grey bark. — Some of this kind of plants were raised from seeds obtained from Grand Cairo by Dr William Sherard, in 1724, and were grown to the height of 18 feet; but were all destroyed by the severe frost in 1740; after which they were unknown in Britain till the return of Mr Adanson to Paris in 1754.