70 ROUND THE YEAR 



I think it likely that remote progenitors of the 

 Crocus had an upright, fleshy stem, with sheathing 

 leaves and flowers at the top. The necessity of 

 storing up a large supply of food for flowering out 

 of the usual season, seems to have caused the stem 

 to enlarge in width, and diminish in height, until 

 it became a sphere, and even a button. The leaf- 

 bases became crowded together ; the lowest dis- 

 appeared as foliage-leaves, leaving only a web of 

 fibres, such as you may see at the base of a palm- 

 leaf. Such reduced leaves form the tunics or pro- 

 tective layers. Normal foliage-leaves and flowers 

 were given off from the summit of the stem as 

 before. The structure of the Crocus-stem and its 

 history from year to year are peculiar, yet not so 

 peculiar but that we can usefully compare it with 

 plants of a more ordinary kind. 



It is well worth while to dissect, out all the parts of 

 a young flowering corm. Take a Crocus in flower, 

 separate one of the small, new corms from the old 

 one, and strip off its envelopes one after another. 

 First come the brown and withered tunics, then a 

 number of soft, white sheaths (the new tunics). Next 

 come the foliage-leaves, one enclosing another. Dissect 

 these carefully away from the corm with needles, and 

 observe that each has a white, ring-like scale at its 

 base, which is plainer in the outermost leaf than in 

 the others. Even the strap-like foliage-leaf seems to 

 be derived from a sheathing, tubular leaf. Inside the 

 foliage-leaves come the flowering branches. Each is- 

 apparently enclosed by a single whitish sheath or 

 bract, but if this is slit open, it will be found to 



