CLXIII. — THE BROAD-LEAVED LINDEN. 
Til in platyphyllos Scopoli. 
T HE Order Malva/es is one of those natural groups upon which systematists are 
in agreement. It includes two Families represented in the British flora, the 
Tiliacece and the Malvacece, which agree in having polysymmetric, complete, 
pentamerous, and usually perfect flowers, with valvate sepals, and two or more 
united carpels with their ovules on their inner or central margins and anatropous. 
The Family Tiliacece comprises some forty genera and less than four hundred species, 
largely Tropical and mostly woody. They have scattered, stipulate leaves, which in 
the trees of the Family are generally arranged on horizontally-spreading sprays, so 
twisted at their bases as to lie in one plane and so wonderfully dovetailed together 
without overlapping as to form a “ mosaic,” exposing the maximum of their surfaces 
to light and air. The leaves are frequently oblique or unsymmetrical at the bases 
of their blades, as they are in the Lindens, the smaller of their two auricles being on 
the side next the branch, this character resulting mechanically from this side being 
innermost in the bud. The flowers are arranged in cymes, are protandrous, and secrete 
honey : they have usually an indefinite number of stamens, each bearing a perfect 
two-chambered anther ; and the seeds are albuminous and have well-developed 
leafy cotyledons. 
The genus Tilia being confined to northern Asia, parts of Europe, and North 
America would probably not have been known to the primitive Aryan race in their 
ancestral home in the uplands of Central Asia, so that their descendants have no 
common name for it. It was the cfnXvpa, philara, of the Greeks, whilst the Latin 
Tilia has given us the Portuguese Til, Spanish Tilo, Italian Tiglio, and French Tilleul, 
and the Teuton — perhaps reminded by its tough bast, or inner bark of the fibre of 
the “ lin,” or “lint,” i.e. the flax ( Linum ) — named it Linta or Linde, which appears 
as Lind in Danish, as Linn in Swedish, as Line in Old English — in the fourth and 
fifth acts of “ The Tempest,” for example — and, perhaps, in the Russian Lipa. Our 
modern English Lime is merely a corruption of Line; whilst to the American these 
beautiful trees are merely Basswoods. 
Botanists must ever look with reverence upon this group of trees ; for whether 
or not a meadow encircled by a hedgerow of Lindens gave the family name to our 
own great botanist John Lindley, it is certain that a Linden growing near the home 
of his ancestors furnished a cognomen to a far greater than Lindley — the immortal 
Carl von Linn6, better known as Linnaeus. 
To the ancients, the Lindens seem to have appealed mainly by their utility. 
Greek ladies and effeminate men used the light wood for purposes to which 
whalebone has been applied in modern times : Virgil refers to its employment, 
also on account of its lightness, for the yoke of the plough-ox ; and Pliny to the 
