To the ancients the Lindens seem to have appealed rather by their utility than by their beauty. It is doubtful whether Aristophanes, in the allusion to the tree in his "Birds," is merely speaking of a rival poet as being light as Linden-wood, or is accusing him more specifically of wearing an effeminate article of dress, strengthened in those days by laths of Linden-wood in place of the whale-bone now usual. Pliny, too, alludes to the lightness of the wood, as well as to the use of the inner bark for paper, when it was known as liber (so becoming extended to books, and giving us the word "library"), and also for tying garlands; whilst Virgil, in the words (Georgics, Book I.):
"Caeditur et tilia ante jugo levis,
