236 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



that he might himself do this office for a tree he had planted in 

 his Tusculanum.* 



Pliny describes some of the most remarkable planes. In the 

 walks of the Academy at Athens, were trees whose trunk was 

 thirty-three cubits, (about forty-eight feet,) to the branches, f 

 In his own time, there was one in Lycia, near a cool fountain 

 by the road-side, with a cavity of eighty-one feet circuit within 

 its trunk, a forest-like head, and arms like trees overshadowing 

 broad fields. Within this apartment, made by moss-covered 

 stones to resemble a grotto, Licinius Mucianus thought it a fact 

 worthy of history, that he dined with nineteen companions, and 

 slept there too, not regretting splendid marbles, pictures and 

 golden fretted roofs, and missing only the sound of rain drops 

 pattering on the leaves. 



In more modern times, the Persians have shown an equal 

 partiality to the plane tree, which they call the chinar. Av- 

 enues and rows of this tree intersect their gardens ; beneath 

 them they love to enjoy the cool breeze, and here they worship ; 

 and they or travellers among them ascribe the virtue of protec- 

 tion from the plague to great numbers of these noble trees plant- 

 ed near their dwellings at Ispahan. J 



In the Levant, in Persia, and in other parts of Asia, where 

 timber trees are few, and where the oriental plane is the com- 

 monest of trees, it is much used in carpentry, joinery, cabinet- 

 making, and even in ship-building. Olivier says,§ "The plane 

 tree grows naturally throughout all the East ; it is common on 

 the banks of the rivulets in Greece, in the islands of the Archi- 

 pelago, on the coast of Asia Minor, in Syria, and in Persia." 

 " Its wood is not inferior for cabinet-work to any wood of 

 Europe ; it takes a beautiful polish, and is very agreeably 

 veined;' 1 and "the Persians employ no other for their fur- 

 niture, their doors and their windows." That it has a beau- 

 tiful surface and a very smooth grain, and that it takes a bril- 



* Macrobius Saturn : II, 9. 



t So I understand, — "cubitorum xxxiii, a radice ramos antecedente." — Nat. 

 Hist., XII, 5. The annotator thinks otherwise. 

 $ Evelyn. 

 § Olivier's Travels, I, 116. 



