feet.  Some twenty feet or more above that first fork was a second fork; and then the tree began.  Where its head was we could not see.  We could only, by laying our faces against the bole and looking up, discern a wilderness of boughs carrying a green cloud of leaves, most of them too high for us to discern their shape without the glasses.  We walked up the slope, and round about, in hopes of seeing the head of the tree clear enough to guess at its total height:  but in vain.  It was only when we had ridden some half mile up the hill that we could discern its masses rising, a bright green mound, above the darker foliage of the forest.  It looked of any height, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet; less it could hardly be.  ‘It made,’ says a note by one of our party, ’other huge trees look like shrubs.’  I am not surprised that my friend Mr. St. Luce D’Abadie, who measured the tree since my departure, found it to be one hundred and ninety-two feet in height.

I was assured that there were still larger trees in the island.  A certain Locust-tree and a Ceiba were mentioned.  The Moras, too, of the southern hills, were said to be far taller.  And I can well believe it; for if huge trees were as shrubs beside that Sandbox, it would be a shrub by the side of those Locusts figured by Spix and Martius, which fifteen Indians with outstretched arms could just embrace.  At the bottom they were eighty-four feet round, and sixty where the boles became cylindrical.  By counting the rings of such parts as could be reached, they arrived at the conclusion that they were of the age of Homer, and 332 years old in the days of Pythagoras.  One estimate, indeed, reduced their antiquity to 2052 years old; while another (counting, I presume, two rings of fresh wood for every year) carried it up to 4104.

So we rode on and up the hills, by green and flowery paths, with here and there a cottage and a garden, and groups of enormous Palmistes towering over the tree-tops in every glen, talking over that wondrous weed, whose head we saw still far below.  For weed it is, and nothing more.  The wood is soft and almost useless, save for firing; and the tree itself, botanists tell us, is neither more nor less than a gigantic Spurge, the cousin-german of the milky garden weeds with which boys burn away their warts.  But if the modern theory be true, that when we speak (as we are forced to speak) of the relationships of plants, we use no metaphor, but state an actual fact; that the groups into which we are forced to arrange them indicate not merely similarity of type, but community of descent—­ then how wonderful is the kindred between the Spurge and the Hura—­ indeed, between all the members of the Euphorbiaceous group, so fantastically various in outward form; so abundant, often huge, in the Tropics, while in our remote northern island their only representatives are a few weedy Spurges, two Dog’s Mercuries—­weeds