76 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



turnip. And in every case the young shoots 

 that spring from them use up the starches and 

 other food-stuffs at first exactly as an animal 

 would do. These stores are often protected 

 against animals by hard coats or poisonous 

 juices. Many well-known examples of sub- 

 terranean stores occur among our spring garden 

 flowers, which are for the most part either 

 bulbous or tuberous. The material laid by in 

 the bulb allows them to start flowering early, 

 while annuals and other unthrifty plants have 

 to wait till they have collected enough material 

 in the same year to flower upon. Hyacinths, 

 tulips, daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses, and the 

 various kinds of squills and jonquils are familiar 

 examples of plants which lay by in one year 

 material for the next year's flowering season. 

 But our wild flowers do the same thing quite as 

 much, though less obtrusively. Our earliest 

 spring buttercup is the bulbous buttercup, which 

 has a swollen root-stock, full of rich material ; 

 and this enables it to flower very soon indeed, 

 while the fibrous - rooted meadow - buttercup, 

 which closely resembles it in most other re- 

 spects, has to wait a month later, and then to 

 raise a much taller stem, in order to overtop the 

 summer grasses, which by that time have reached 

 a considerable height. Still earlier, however, is 

 another buttercup -like plant, the lesser celandine, 

 which has material laid by in little pill-like 

 tubers ; and these have given it its curious old 

 English name of pilewort. Other early spring 

 wild-flowers are the wood anemone and marsh- 

 marigold, with rich and thick almost tuberous 



