THE HOPKINSVILLE KENTUCKIAN — JUNE 27, 1899
GROWS IN MADAGASCAR ♢ A Plant Which has a Clutch That Kills
The man eating tree, or tree devil, of Madagascar, resembles a pineapple in shape, with a series, of long hairy, green tendrils stretched out in every direction toward the horizon at the top. The trunk of the tree is about eight feet high, black and hard as iron, and the tendrils are seven or eight feet long, tapered from four inches, to half an inch in diameter. Above these, from between the upper and under end, six white and almost transparent palpi rear themselves toward the sky, twirling and twisting with a marvelous, incessant motion, yet constantly reaching upward—thin as reeds and frail as quills apparently, yet five or six feet tall—with a subtle sinuous silent throbbing against the air, with their suggestions of serpents dancing on their tails. On the summit of the tree there is a cup containing a viscid fluid, and all who drink of it become wild with frenzy, and the atrocious cannibal tree fastens around them its tendrils, one after another like great green serpents with brutal energy and terrible rapidity, until life is extinct.
In India their grows a marvelous palm called the self-lifting tree. The plant is 11 feet in height, not including the leaves and stems, and it changes in position every morning and evening. “At 5:30 o’clock the tree was almost lying towards the west. The foot of it was at an eagle [angle] of five to seven degrees with the ground, and we were given to understand that it had already commenced to rise at four
