The picture of India : geographical, historical, and descriptive / by Robert Mudie.

  • Robert Mudie
Date:
[1830]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The picture of India : geographical, historical, and descriptive / by Robert Mudie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    33/888 (page 9)
    circle of root for a few years, as the monument of its former majesty. Not so with the banyan tree. It is not dependant on a single root and trunk, the labour of which, and consequently their tendency to decay, increase with the increase of the tree. The branches divide the labour with the root that produced them. As soon as they have extended to that lateral dis- tance which requires a prop to support them during the violence of the storms, they dart down perpendicular shoots, which instantly strike root in the ground, and at once give stability and send up nourishment to the tree, the original stem of which they in time emulate in diameter; and the whole tree stands a grove of three or four hundred massy stems, all ramified into one verdant canopy, so that no storm can root it up, and each contributes to the nourishment and life of the whole; while, as the branches, which derive fresh vigour from the virgin soil into which the new roots have struck, extend further in a lateral direc- tion, hundreds of new shoots are in preparation, so that the nourishment and vitality of the mighty mass of vegetation are always increased in the full ratio of its size. Over such a tree the common lapse of time, and the casualties of the weather, violent as the latter are in India, have no power ; and it can become a