There is also a Virginian cypress, of an enormous height, beautiful and very spreading, the branches and leaves large and regular, with the clogs resembling the cypress; and though the timber be somewhat course and cross-grain’d, ’tis when polish’d, very agreeable; as I can shew in a very large table, made out of the planks of a spurr only; and had experience of its lastingness, tho’ expos’d both to the air and weather.
14. What the uses of this timber are, for chests, and other utensils, harps, and divers other musical instruments (it being a very sonorous wood, and therefore employ’d for organ-pipes, as heretofore for supporters of vines, poles, rails, and planks, (resisting the worm, moth, and all putrefaction to eternity) the Venetians sufficiently understood; who did every twenty year, and oftner (the Romans every thirteen) make a considerable revenue of it out of Candy: And certainly, a very gainful commodity it was, when the fell of a _cupressetum_, was heretofore reputed a good daughters portion, and the plantation it self call’d _dos filiæ_. But there was in Candy a vast wood of these trees, belonging to the Republique, by malice, or accident (or perhaps by solar heat, as were many woods 74 years after, even here in England) set on fire, which _anno_ 1400, burning for seven years continually, before it could be quite extinguish’d, fed so long a space by the unctuous nature of the timber, of which there were to be seen at Venice planks of above four foot in breadth; and formerly the valves of St. Peter’s church at Rome, were fram’d of this material, which lasted from the great Constantine, to Pope Eugenius the Fourth’s time, eleven hundred years; and then were found as fresh, and entire as if they had been new: But this Pope would needs change them for gates of brass, which were cast by the famous Antonio Philarete; not in my opinion so venerable, as those of cypress. It was in coffins of this material, that Thucydides tells us, the Athenians us’d to bury their heroes, and the mummy-chests brought with those condited bodies out of Egypt, are many of them of this material, which ’tis probable may have lain in those dry, and sandy _crypta_, many thousand years.