126 SQUILLS 



taking them to an island and hardly allowing them to be 

 seen for the next week.' 



XXX 



Those who have visited Kew Gardens during the 

 late uncertain spring (1907) do not require 

 to be told what is a squill, for if they did 

 not know it before, their attention is sure to have been 

 drawn to the lovely little blossoms of brightest blue 

 which sparkled in the borders and in the grass when 

 'the borrowing days' were at their wildest, and the 

 label will have informed them that they were admiring 

 the Siberian squill. The name smacks of the pharma- 

 copoeia ; howbeit, the plant which produces the drug, 

 though classed as a squill, has now been rechristened 

 Urginea ; at least it was so a few years ago, but the 

 decrees of modern classifiers are not on the model of 

 the Medes and Persians, and to follow their changes 

 taxes the ordinary citizen's nimbleness not a little. 



The squills remain a numerous family without 

 Urginea, whom they have lost, differing from hyacinths 

 only in this, that the six segments of the blue perianth 

 are divided from each other, instead of being united in 

 a bell, as in the hyacinth. For this reason the blue 

 wood hyacinth (you English people call it the blue- 

 bell, but north of the Tweed we only recognise hare- 

 bells as 'the Bluebells of Scotland') the blue wood 

 hyacinth, I say, has been taken out of the genus 

 Hyacinthus, whereof its appearance and habit seem 

 to warrant it a member, and added to that of Scilla, 



