THE PLANES 147 
detail, even on a single bough, is practically in- 
finite. No leaf rebels more against the misrepre- 
sentations of the geometrical school of draughts- 
men. 
The bark is by itself sufficient to distinguish 
the Plane from the Sycamore (A’cer Pseu’do- 
platanus), which is commonly confounded with it, 
especially in Scotland; but the Sycamore has also 
its leaves in opposite pairs and far less smooth, 
whilst in autumn they are almost always marked 
with the round blots of an ink-black parasitic fungus. 
When the foliage is yet young, the drooping 
flower-stalks are produced, the pollen-bearing flowers 
being on distinct branches from those that yield fruit, 
though either kind is collected together into the 
characteristic “buttons,” or globular catkins. 
The Oriental Plane is first mentioned, among 
English writers, by William Turner, in his “ Herbal,” 
printed at Cologne in 1568; and in 1596 John 
Gerard had it growing in his garden in Holborn, 
the history of his specimen being subsequently 
given by him in his “ Herball” (1597), p. 1304, as 
follows :— 
“My seruant William Marshall, whom I sent into the 
Mediterranean Sea as chirurgion vnto the Hercules of London, 
found divers trees heerof growing in Lepante, hard by the sea 
side, at the entrance into the towne, a port of Morea, being 
a ‘part of Greece, and from thence brought one of those rough 
buttons. being the fruit thereof.” 
Our Transatlantic neighbours still call the 
Plane the Button-ball, or Button-wood. 
One of the most striking structural peculiari- 
ties of the Planes is the fact that during the 
