DERIVATIONS OF THE LATIN NAMES OF PLANTS. 23 



Romans, and of such were composed the celebrated Tigrine and Pantherine tables ; 

 of which some particular specimens, as those of Cicero, Asinius Gallus, King 

 Juba, and the Mauritanian Ptolemy, are said to have been worth nearly their 

 weight in gold. But in modern times it has been in a great degree superseded 

 by mahogany. At that remote era it was deemed a suitable material for pur- 

 poses of state, and thus Virgil — 



" A maple throne rais'd higher from the ground 

 Receiv'd the Trojan chief." 



Pliny eulogizes the knobs and excrescences, the brusca and mollusca of this 

 tree, which often represented, in their natural contortions, birds, beasts, &c, as 

 does Ovid the clouded or mottled Maple. When allowed to grow to timber, it 

 makes excellent gun-stocks, and screws for cider-presses. The Maple, though in 

 our time rarely permitted to rise higher than brush- wood, has been known to exist 

 more than two centuries : at Knowle, in Kent, the Duke of Dorset's seat, one 

 measures twelve to fourteen feet in growth. The wood is much used for turning 

 in the lathe, and vessels may be thus produced so thin as to transmit light. 

 The foliage assumes a remarkably rich and mellow autumnal tint, of the successive 

 variations of which an elaborate description may be found in the Journal of a 

 Naturalist ; where also it is remarked that Maple is useful in hedges, not from 

 the opposition it affords, but by reason of its very quick growth from the stole 

 after it has been cut, whence it makes a fence in a shorter time than most of its 

 companions ; and when fire-wood is an object, it soon becomes sufficiently large 

 for that purpose. The leaves often in summer exhibit a white mouldy aspect, 

 which appears to be a mere exudation.* The younger foliage, in spring, is beset 

 with numerous red-coloured spiculse, conjectured by the above writer to be 

 occasioned by the puncture of some insect, probably for the formation of a nidus 

 for its young. A thin slice of the singularly rugged young shoot, cut through 

 horizontally, presents a beautiful and curious object in the microscope (Journ. 

 Nat, pi. 4, fig. 1.), exhibiting the different channels and variously-formed tubes 

 through which the sap flows, and the air circulates for the supply of all the 

 diversified requirements of the plant ; " it is good and delightful," adds the author 

 of the same work, " to contemplate the wonderful mechanism that has been 

 devised by the Almighty Architect, for the sustenance and particular necessities 

 of the simple Maple ; which naturally leads one to consider that, if He has so 



* Mr. W. Baxter, in his Flowering Plants, observes hat tthis is probably occasioned by the 

 interwoven filaments of Erysiphe bicornes, a minute parasitical fungus, the receptacles of which 

 he finds very commonly interspersed amongst these filaments on the leaves of the Maple in the 

 neighbourhood of Oxford. 



