Cliap. 76.] 
THE SIZE OF TREES. 
419 
martial powers had been in the habit of suspending their arms. 
In the lapse of time the bark of this tree had closed, and 
quite concealed these arms from view. Upon it, however, de- 
pended the fate of the city ; for it had been announced by an 
oracle, that when a tree there should bring forth arms, the fall 
of the city would be close at hand : and such, in fact, was the 
result, when the tree was cut down and greaves and helmets 
w^ere found within the wood.^-^ It is said that stones found 
under these circumstances have the property of preventing 
abortion. 
(40.) It is generally thought that the largest^^ tree that has 
ever been seen, was the one that was exhibited at Home, by 
Tiberius Csesar, as an object of curiosity, upon the bridge ot" 
the JSTaumachia previously mentioned. It had been brqnght 
thither along with other timber, and was preserved till the con- 
struction of the amphitheatre of the Emperor ISTero it was a 
log of larch, one hundred and twenty feet long, and of an uniform 
thickness of a couple of feet. From this fact we can form an 
estimate of the original height of the tree ; indeed, measured 
from top to bottom it must have been originally of a length 
that is almost incredible. In our own time, too, in the porticos 
of the Septa, there was a log which had been left there by M. 
Agrippa, as being equally an object of curiosity, having been 
found too large to be used in the building of the vote office 
there : it was twenty feet shorter than the one previously men-' 
tioned, and a foot-and-a-half in thickness. There was a lir, 
too, that was particularly admired, when it formed the mast 
of the ship, which brought from Egypt, by order of the Em- 
peror Cains, the obelisk^^ that was erected in the Yaticanian 
Circus, with the four blocks of stone intended for its base. It 
is beyond all doubt that there has been seen nothing on the sea 
13 He takes this account from Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. B. t. c. 3. 
1^ The greatest height, Fee says, of any tree known, is that of the 
palm, known as ceroxylon ; it sometimes attains a height of 250 feet. 
Adanson speaks of the baobab as being 90 feet in circumference. 
1^ In c, 74. 1^ See B. xix. c. 6. 
1'' A spot enclosed in the Campus Martins, for the resort of the people 
during the Comitia, and Avhen giving their votes. 
18 u Diribitorium." This was the place, probably, where the diribitores 
distributed to the citizens the tabellae, with Avhich they voted in the 
Comitia, or else, as Wunder thinks, divided the votes, acting as " tellers/* 
in the modern phrase. Caligula. 20 -q xxxvi. c. 14. 
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