VIL. THE BUTTONWOOD TREE. 235 
feet two inches at six, just above a small branch. This is a 
magnificent tree, holding its size for twenty feet, and, though 
inclining towards the northeast, sustaining a broad, cylindrical 
and noble head of great height. At West Springfield, I meas- 
ured, in 1838, one by the road-side, which I found to be sixteen 
feet six inches at four feet from the ground. 
The oriental plane tree holds the same place on the Eastern 
continent which our buttonwood does on this. It differs from 
the occidental, as has been already said, in having a more pal- 
mate leaf and a less umbrageous head. Yet it was the greatest 
favorite among the ancients. Cimon sought to gratify the Athe- 
nians by planting a public walk with it. It was considered the 
finest shade tree of Europe. 
Pliny expresses his admiration that a tree valuable only for 
its shade should have been introduced from a distant part of the 
world. He tells the story of its having been brought across 
the Ionian Sea to shade the tomb of Diomedes, in the island of 
the hero, that it came thence into fertile Sicily, and was among 
the first of foreign trees presented to Italy, and that too, as early 
as the taking of Rome by the Gauls. From Italy 1t was carried 
into Spain, and even into the most remote parts of then barba- 
rous France, where the natives were made to pay for the privi- 
lege of sitting under its shade.* No tree was ever so great a 
favorite with the Romans. They ornamented their villas with 
it, valuing it above all other trees for the depth of its salutary 
shade in summer, and the freedom with which it let in the 
winter’s sun. They nourished it with pure wine;t and Hor- 
tensius is related to have begged of his rival, Cicero, to ex- 
change turns with him in a cause in which they were engaged, 
* Sed quis non jure miretur, arborem umbre gratia tantum ex alieno petitam 
orbe? Platanus heec est, mare Ionium in Diomedis insulam eyusdem tumuli gra- 
tia primum invecta, &c.—Plnw Sec. Nat. Hist., XII, 3. 
+ Martial wrote an epigram to Cesar’s plane at Tartessus, on the Beetis, the 
jewel of his palace : 
/Edibus in medus totas amplexa Penates 
Stat platanus : 
To its other honors he adds— 
Crevit et effuso latior umbra mero.-—Epig., IX, 62. 
