TAMARINDUS INDICA. L11111.
This is a very handsome tree, of slow growth, but attains a great size, with a very extensive shady head. It is met with in gardens, near old temples, and in avenues, where it has been planted. It is a graceful avenue tree, and grows throughout Hindustan, in the Peninsulas, in Burma and the Archipelago, but is rare in the Panjab.
In Burma it rises to 90 or 100 feet high, and 12 to 15 in circumference. The branches extend widely, with a dense foliage of bright green com posite leaves, very much like those of the sensitive plant. The flowers are in clusters of a beautiful yellow, veined with rect. The pods hang like beans, are longer, darker, and richer than the tamarind of the West Indies, and are preserved without the addition of syrup.
Its timber is remarkably heavy and hard, much like lignmn vitm, and is used generally for shivers in blocks, and such purposes. It is dark coloured and durable, is often finely veined, the heart-wood of old trees resembling ebony. The tree is apt to be hollow in the centre, which prevents large slabs being obtained. It is used in the manufacture of sugar and oil mills, naves, mallets, rice - pounders, and for furniture and building purposes, but silica is often deposited in its stem, and carpenters are very unwilling to work it up, on account of tho great damage it causes to the best tempered tools. It is valuable
for brick and tile burning. The trees grow to about 7 or 8 feet in diameter at the butt, while that of the body of the tree is about 5 feet. This part is seldom more than 10 feet long when it branches out into curves of various dimensions. Several large trees of the West Indian red tamarind grow in the south of India, and the Editor largely distributed the seeds through the Madras Board of Revenue. The tree is valuable from the quantity of fruit it produces, which is used medicinally in cookery. In India, the shadow of the tamarind tree is deemed particularly injurious to vegetation, and for people to reside beneath this tree is supposed, in India, to be unhealthy ; but in the northern part of the island of Ceylon, people build their houses beneath the tamarind tree as the coolest site.