58 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
and suggestive of Dahlia roots. This is due to the 
storing up in them of the food supplies manufactured 
in the leaves of the plant last 
year. When the heat of summer 
came, drying up the moisture the 
Pilewort had found so useful in 
the spring, there was danger that 
so soft-textured a plant would be 
dried up and destroyed. As 
a fact, its stems and leaves 
withered and disappeared, but 
that was due to the cuteness 
of the plant in transferring all 
at ies its substance to its root-fibres, 
Nectay | Which expanded their cells to 
accommodate it. All plants 
that are able to indulge in very 
early and sudden displays of leaf and flower do so by 
the practice of thrift in the previous year. They do 
not throw off leaves charged with 'plant-food, as do 
many of the trees and shrubs; the leaves instead are 
gradually emptied of all that is worth saving, and so 
the exposed portions of the plant wither. This is the 
process adopted by all the bulbous plants,—Crocus, 
Tulip, Hyacinth, ete.—and by drawing upon their 
savings such plants can blossom as soon as the 
severities of the winter have passed, and before their 
leaves have been able to accomplish their proper 
functions. Ages ago, when men held what was called 
the Doctrine of Signatures, this bunch of thickened 
root-fibres depending from the base of the Celandine 
was thought to resemble hemorrhoids, therefore they 
gave the plant the name of Pilewort, and considered 
Lesser Celandine 
