236 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
that he might himself do this office for a tree he had planted in 
his Tusculanum.* 
Pliny describes some of the most remarkable planes. In the 
walks of the Academy at Athens, were trees whose trunk was 
thirty-three cubits, (about forty-eight feet,) to the branches.t 
In his own time, there was one in Lycia, near a cool fountain 
by the road-side, with a cavity of eighty-one feet circuit within 
its trunk, a forest-like head, and arms like trees overshadowing 
broad fields. Within this apartment, made by moss-covered 
stones to resemble a grotto, Licinius Mucianus thought it a fact 
worthy of history, that he dined with nineteen companions, and 
slept there too, not regretting splendid marbles, pictures and 
golden fretted roofs, and missing only the sound of rain drops 
pattering on the leaves. 
In more modern times, the Persians have shown an equal 
partiality to the plane tree, which they call the chinar. Av- 
enues and rows of this tree intersect their gardens; bencath 
them they love to enjoy the cool breeze, and here they worship ; 
and they or travellers among them ascribe the virtue of protec- 
tion from the plague to great numbers of these noble trees plant- 
ed near their dwellings at Ispahan.t 
In the Levant, in Persia, and in other parts of Asia, where 
timber trees are few, and where the oriental plane is the com- 
monest of trees, it is much used in carpentry, jomery, cabinet- 
making, and even in ship-building. Olivier says,$ “The plane 
tree grows naturally throughout all the East; it is common on 
the banks of the rivulets in Greece, in the islands of the Archi- 
pelago, on the coast of Asia Minor, in Syria, and in Persia.” 
“Its wood is not inferior for cabmet-work to any wood of 
Europe; it takes a beautiful polish, and is very agreeably 
veined;’”? and “the Persians employ no other for their fur- 
niture, their doors and their windows.” That it has a beau- 
tiful surface and a very smooth grain, and that it takes a bril- 
* Macrobius Saturn: II, 9. 
* So I understand,— cubitorum xxxiu, a radice ramos antecedente.’’— Nat. 
fst., XTI, 5. The annotator thinks otherwise. 
{ Evelyn. 
§ Olivier’s Travels, I, 116. 
