OF FOREST-TREES. 



189 



tree, whose stump was remaining above 1500 years. Not to omit that CHAP. III. 

 other Fig-tree, yet standing near Cairo, which is said to have opened in ' "^"^^^ 

 two to receive and protect the blessed Virgin and holy Babe, as she was 

 flying into Egypt ; but is now shewed whole again, as Monconys, who 

 saw it, but believed nothing of it, tells the story. There is yet there 

 a tree of the same kind, which measures seventeen paces in circum- 

 ference. 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 of being excavated into 

 vessels that would contain two hundred men a-piece. To which, add 

 those superannuated Tilias now at Basil, and that of Ausburgh, 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 one hundred paces diameter, from a stem of about 

 twenty feet 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, et tanquam sacras ex vetustate, as Quinctilian 

 speaks. And like to these might that Cypress be, which ' is celebrated 

 by Virgil, near to another monument 



But we will spare our reader, and refer him that has a desire to mul- 

 tiply examples of this kind, to those undoubted records our natm-alist 

 mentions in lib. xvi. chap. xliv. where he shall read of Scipio African us's 

 Olive-trees ; Diana's Lotus ; the ruminal Fig-tree, under which the 

 bitch wolf suckled the founder of Rome and his brother, lasting (as Tacitus 

 calculated) eight hundred and forty years, putting out new shoots, and 

 presaging the translation of that empire from the CiEsarian line, happen- 

 ing in Nero's reign : the Ilex, of prodigious antiquity, as the Hetruscan 

 inscription remaining on it imported. But Pausanias, in his Arcadics, 

 thinks the Samian Vitex, of which already, to be one of the oldest trees 

 growing, and the Platan set by Menelaus : to these he adds the Dehan 

 Palm, coevous with Apollo himself, and the Olive planted by Minerva, 



' juxtaque antiqua cupressus, 



Religione patrum multos servata per annos. 

 Volume II. B b 



iEN. 2. 



