154 WHENCE CAME THE TULIP? 



whence is obtained, by corruption, turban, the characteristic 

 head-gear of the Orientals. Thus, at bottom, tulip and 

 turban are the same word, only altered in form. 



Who does not know with what a glory of colours the 

 skill of our horticulturists has succeeded in clothing the 

 tulip ? 



Inasmuch as the cultivated species bears the distinctive 

 addition of Gesneriana, and of this species all existing tulips 

 are but varieties, we might reasonably suppose that Gesner, 

 the celebrated Swiss naturalist (who died at Zurich, aged sixty- 

 nine, in 1565), was the first to speak of it. But he makes no 

 allusion to it in his " Historia Plantarum " (printed at Bale in 

 1541); he only refers to it in his "Additions" to the works 

 of Valerius Cordus, published in 1561. 



We subjoin a literal translation of the words of Conrad 

 Gesner : 



"In the year 1559, at the beginning of April, I saw at 

 Augsburg, in the garden of F. H. Herwart, magistrate of 

 that town, a plant whose seed had been brought from Con- 

 stantinople, or, according to some, from Cappadocia. It was 

 called tulip." 



About the same epoch, this plant was cultivated at Vienna, 

 in the gardens of some wealthy amateurs ; whence several 

 tulip-bulbs were afterwards sent into England. 



This ornamental plant, whose splendour is of such brief 

 duration, became, towards the middle of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, the object of a commercial speculation, which marks an 



