Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 81, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1901 — A Natural Lighthouse. [ARTICLE]

A Natural Lighthouse.

Among the world’s curiously formed trees, the Asiatic star tree is not conspicuous, but among nature’s freaks in the tree class it stands alone. Its properties are entirely peculiar to itself. Its history is clouded, its attributes unlike anything seen in other 'trees. >• Enormously tall, a man of ordinary height is dwarfed into nothingness beside its trunk. Bare from the ground up to a distance of about forty feet, it puts forth at that place a hundred tangled limbs. From the latter there shoot out great clusters of long, pointed leaves, which, bunching themselves together, exude a kind of phosphorescent light at night, giving a strange spectral appearance to*tlie big tree.. Travelers on'the desert, descrying this tree at night, frequently mistake the giant-leaved thing for the illuminated window of a house or some lonely tower. The light is not brilliant; it is subdued, but voluminous, and lasts until daybreak.