214 SPRING BLOSSOMS. 



have given it its common local names of pill wort 

 and })ile\v()it. The Lent lilies, now so commonly 

 sold in great bunches about the streets of London 

 — since the " aisthetic " reformers brought English 

 wild-flowers for a while into fashion — are the 

 uncultivated form of the native daffodil, and grow, 

 like all their tribe, from deeply rooted bulbous 

 bases. The American yellow lilies are of like 

 habit. The common arum, known to village chil- 

 dren by its quaint old-fashioned name of lords- 

 and-ladies, and to country-folk generally by the 

 still quainter and older title of cuckoo-pint, has a 

 thick and succulent buried rootstock so richly 

 stored with an abundant stock of hoarded nutri- 

 ment that it used in former days to be dug up on 

 the Isle of Portland for the sake of the starch it 

 contained, which was sold to poor consumers as 

 Portland arrowroot. Similarly, the little yellow 

 bulbous buttercup is the first of all our true but- 

 tercups to unfold its golden petals to the sun ; 

 ■while the almost indistinguishable meadow butter- 

 cup, discriminated from it in the blossom onl}^ by 

 botanical eyes, flowers a full month or six weeks 

 later, because it has no bulb or tuber from which 

 to derive a store of ready-made material. 



The rationale of this almost universal bulbous 

 habit among early spring flowers hardly needs to 

 be pointed out to the intelligent observer of the 

 external world. Leaves, as everybody now knows, 



