326 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
I have had bulbs of the beautiful Japanese Lily 
(L. auratum) into which slugs had bored by eating 
away the stem, and so hollowing out the bulb; to all 
appearance the bulb was ruined, but by cleaning out 
the slugs and replanting, I got some forty or fifty 
tiny bulbs produced by the sound seales. A big bulb 
will sometimes deliberately break itself into several 
smaller ones, and there is always a tendency to go 
away from acentre. Thus, if a Lily-bulb be planted 
say In the centre of a tub or large flower-pot, it will 
be found after two or three years that the plant no 
longer comes up in the centre, but that several 
smaller stems shoot up from near the circumference. 
This phenomenon is due to the exhaustion of the 
soil for that species in the centre, and the plant makes 
an effort to get away from it. If we are not merely 
plant-growers, but investigators also, we shall want 
to know how it is done, and on carefully taking off 
the top-soil we shall be enlightened. The old bulb has 
broken up into five or six smaller ones, and these 
instead of sending up vertical stems, have shot out 
horizontally, until the pot or tub has stopped their 
progress, when they grow upwards. The scales 
of these bulbs become thin and flabby by their 
material being used up for the new stems and flowers, 
but when the material freshly elaborated by the 
leaves is carried down in autumn, it goes not to the 
former station for the bulb, but only to the point 
where the stem took its upward direction. Thus is 
the mysterious movement of Lily-bulbs and Tulip- 
bulbs explained. This and several other facts we 
have already adduced in these pages suggest that 
if Alexander Pope returned to this life he 
