Baobab
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Baobab. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a tree also styled the monkey-bread, African calabash, Ethiopian ian sourgourd tree. It has a or fantastic look, its stem being of little height, but of great thickness; one specimen was found 30 feet in diameter. The fruit is about 10 inches long. Externally it is downy; within this down is a hard, woody rind, containing an eatable pulp, of slightly acid taste. The juice mixed with sugar is serviceable in putrid and pestilential fevers. The and the symphonic poems, "Dante" adansonia is properly a native of Africa, (1902); "The Fire Worshippers" but it has been introduced into India. It (1892); and "Saul" (1907). is known as Adansonia digitata, being so named after Adanson French traveler, who lived from 1749 , a celebrated to 1754 in Senegal. The tree is liable to be attacked by a fungus which, vegetating in the woody part, renders it soft and pithlike. By the negroes of the W. coast these trunks are into chambers, and dead bodies are sushollowed pended in them.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ba'o-bab, a tropical tree of western and southern Africa. A baobab tree in its glory forms a low, broad, hemispherical mass of green, perhaps sixty feet high and one hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The trunk of such a tree is thirty feet in diameter, half as thick as it is high. It has been called the largest known tree, but must yield this honor to the eucalyptus, or to giant trees of California. Large white flowers hang in drooping clusters a yard long. The fruit, called monkey's bread, supports a crowd of these animals. It is useful to travelers to quench thirst and ward off pestilential fevers. Livingstone speaks of this tree in his South African travels.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 described the baobab as a botanical curiosity whose juice, "mixed with sugar, is serviceable in putrid and pestilential fevers," and Aiton's in 1910 credited it with warding off pestilence for travellers; the fruit is now a globally traded commodity instead, cleared for sale as a food ingredient in the European Union in 2008 and in the United States the following year, marketed for its vitamin C and fibre rather than as a fever remedy. Radiocarbon dating of the trunks, which are built of fused stems rather than a single bole, has confirmed ages of well over 2,000 years, making the species among the oldest flowering plants alive. The most alarming change is recent: since about 2005 a striking number of the largest and oldest known African baobabs have collapsed and died, a die-off reported in 2018 and widely linked to heat and drought. Botanists also now recognise several species in the genus, most of them confined to Madagascar, where the Avenue of the Baobabs has become a famous landmark.
Written for this edition, 2026.