30 S Y L V A BOOK in 



nothing of it) tells the story. There is yet there a 

 tree of the same kind, which measures 17 paces in 

 circumference : And now in the Aventine Mount 

 they shew us the malus Medica^ planted by the hand 

 of St. Dominic, and another in the monastery at Fundi, 

 where Thomas Aquinas lived, planted by that saint, 

 1278. In Congo they speak of trees capable to be 

 excavated into vessels, that would contain two hun- 

 dred men a-piece. To which add those superannuated 

 tilias now at Basil, and that of Auspurg, under whose 

 prodigious shade they so often feast, and celebrate 

 their weddings ; because they are all of them noted 

 for their reverend antiquity ; that of Basil branching 

 out 100 paces diameter, from a stem of about 20 

 foot in circle, under which the German Emperors 

 have sometimes eaten : And to such trees it seems 

 they paid divine honours, as the nearest emblems of 

 eternity, 6? tanquam sacras ex vetustate, as Quintilian 

 speaks. And like to these might that cypress be, 

 which is celebrated by Virgil, near to another monu- 

 ment. 



5. But we will spare our reader, and refer him 

 that has a desire to multiply examples of this kind, 

 to those undoubted records our naturalist mentions in 

 his 44 chap. lib. 16. where he shall read of Scipio 

 Africanus's olive-trees ; Diana's lotus ; the ruminal 

 fig-tree ; under which the bitch-wolf suckl'd the 

 founder of Rome and his brother; lasting (as Tacitus 

 calculated) 840 years ; putting out new shoots, pre- 

 saging the translation of that empire from the Caesarian 

 line, hapning in Nero's reign. The ilex, of prodigious 

 antiquity, as the Hetruscian inscription remaining on 

 it imported : But Pausanias in his Arcadica, thinks 

 the Samian J>itex (of which already) to be one of the 



