Daubeny, _Trees of the Ancients_, p. 19. Footnote 201: Dierbach, _Flora Mythologica_, p. 42. What might be called the ornamental part of the Ogygian groves consisted of black poplars, aromatic cypresses, and alders. Indigenous there, likewise, although heard of only as supplying perfumed firewood, were the ‘cedar’ and ‘_thuon_,’ split logs of which blazed within the fragrant cavern where Calypso was found by Hermes tunefully singing while she plied the shuttle. The cedar here mentioned, however, was no ‘cedar of Lebanon,’ but a description of juniper which attains the full dimensions of a tree in the lands bordering on the Levant.[202] The resinous wood yielded by it was highly valued by the Homeric Greeks for its ‘grateful smell’; store-rooms for precious commodities, and the ‘perfumed apartments’ of noble ladies were constructed of it. This, at least, is expressly stated of Hecuba’s chamber, and can be inferred of Helen’s and Penelope’s. The _thuon_, or ‘wood of sacrifice,’ burnt with cedar-wood on Calypso’s hearth, was identified by Pliny with the African _citrus_, extravagantly prized for decorative furniture in Imperial Rome, and thought to be represented by a coniferous tree called _Thuya articulata_, now met with in Algeria.[203] Footnote 202: Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 232. Footnote 203: Daubeny, _op. cit._ pp. 40-42. The trees shadowing, in the Odyssey, the entrance by the ‘deep-flowing Ocean’ to the barren realm of death,[204] appear to have been selected for that position owing to a supposed incapacity for ripening fruit. The grove in question was composed of ‘lofty poplars’ and ‘seed-shedding willows’; and poplars and willows were alike deemed sterile and, because sterile, of evil omen.[205] Even among ourselves, the willow retains a dismal significance, and it is prominent in Chinese funeral rites.[206] The black poplar continued to the end sacred to Persephone; but its connexion with Hades, in the traditions of historic Greece, was less explicit than that of the white poplar (_Populus alba_). This last tree, called by Homer _acheroïs_, had its especial habitat on the shores of the Acheron in Thesprotia, whence, as Pausanias relates,[207] it was brought to the Peloponnesus by Hercules; and the same hero, in a variant of the story, returned crowned with poplar from his successful expedition to Hades. In the Odyssey the white poplar does not occur, and in the Iliad only in a simile employed to render more impressive, first the collapse of Asius under the stroke of Idomeneus, and again the overthrow of Sarpedon by Patroclus. ‘And he fell, as an oak falls, or a poplar, or tall pine tree, that craftsmen have felled on the hills, with new-whetted axes.’[208] Footnote 204: _Odyssey_, x. 510. Footnote 205: Hayman’s ed. of the _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 174; Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xvi. 46. Footnote 206: Gubernatis, _Mythologie des Plantes_, t. ii. p. 337. Footnote 207: _Descriptio Græciæ_, v. 14.