jESCULUS HIPPOCAS'MNUJI- horse chesnut. 
CLASS, HEPTANDRIA ; ORDER, MONOGYNIA. 
NATURAL ORDER, H1PPOCASTANACEA3. 
Gen. Char. Calyx, swelled, four or five toothed. Corel, 
correspondingly, four or five petalled, inserted on the former, 
unequal, and downy. Capsule, three celled. Seeds, large solitary. 
Spec. Char. Leaves, digitate, with seven divisions. Corel, five 
petalled, spreading. 
This magnificent, tree as Tyas remarks, was originally brought 
from India, and has been naturalized in Europe for more than two 
centuries ; in America not quite so long, as it took quite a circui- 
tous mode of reaching us, by way of Constantinople, Vienna, Italy, 
France, and England. It gives the deepest and most solemn 
shade of any tree that is yet known, and for this purpose, as well as 
its extreme cleanliness and rapidity of growth, is much used in 
parks, avenues, streets, and to shade houses. It luxuriates in the 
Tuilleries in France, where it rises around the great basin in 
masses of incomparable beauty, and at the Luxembourg, spreads 
its branches in accordant pomp and splendor. It can easily be 
distinguished from other trees by its magnificence of size and 
form, were not the five or seven leaves it bears on each footstalk, 
spread out like a human hand, a sufficient distinction. Its blossom 
is certainly one of the most splendid and elegant produced by any 
timber tree in the country. When in full flower, its delicate spikes 
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