150 FAMILIAR TREES 
It seems that the American Plane does not attain 
the size or age of its Oriental brother. Neither form 
occurs commonly in forests or even in large groups; 
but single trees growing in plains or in river alluvium, 
in which it rejoices, sometimes reach enormous di- 
mensions, and, from the gratefulness of their shade, 
in hot countries have long been venerated. At 
Caphyee, in Arcadia, a beautiful Plane-tree was shown 
to Pausanias, which was said to have been planted, 
1,300 years before, by Menelaus, the husband of 
Helen, before his departure for the Trojan War. 
When Xerxes invaded Greece, another Plane so 
delighted him by its size, that he—somewhat un- 
kindly, but no doubt with good intentions—encircled 
it with a collar of gold, stamped a figure of it on a 
gold medal which he continually wore, and tarried 
so long beneath it as to ruin his chances of success. 
Pliny speaks of a Plane in Lycia over eighty feet 
in circumference, so that eighteen persons could dine 
within it; whilst at Buyukderé, three leagues from 
Constantinople, there still exists a tree of this species 
100 feet high, 165 feet in girth, and 130 feet in the 
spread of its branches, being, perhaps, over 2,000 
years old. 
To the student of philosophy the Plane must 
always be associated with the groves of the Academe, 
in which walked the earliest of the peripatetic 
philosophers. This may have been in the mind of 
Tennyson, when he associated the Princess Ida’s 
female Academe with “the thick-leaved Platans of 
the vale.” Even in England, where it was thought 
in 1633 that it would only flourish if “cherised and. 
