254 Flowers and their Pedigrees, 



icomposes the flower in the popular sense of the 

 'word. . . 



There is nothing at all like that, a casual observer 

 would probably be tempted at first to say, in any 

 ordinary true lily that any one ever yet came across. 

 A bunch of lilies growing; on a stalk, with a sort of 

 huge winding-sheet wrapped round them, is a thing 

 that surely nobody has ever seen. So it would seem 

 at a first glance ; and yet there is one lily-like plant 

 that we all know well, in which the flowers are at one 

 time wrapped up in exactly such an enveloping sheet. 

 Have you ever watched a narcissus or a daffodil un- 

 folding its pretty yellow buds ? If you have, you will 

 remember that at first they are all tightly covered over 

 by a thin papery membrane, shaped exactly like the 

 hood of this cuckoo-pint ; and that after the scented 

 blossoms have all come out, this membrane, or spathe, 

 as we call it in the horrid technical language of botany, 

 turns back upon the stem, like a sort of cup below the 

 flowers. To be sure, the daffodil and the narcissus 

 are not, in the strictest sense of the word, true lilies at 

 all, but amaryllids, because they have got an inferior 

 instead of a superior ovary ; but, even in the technically 

 restricted lily family itself, there arc lilies with just 

 such a spathe or enveloping membrane, as in the 

 familiar head of onions and garlic, as well as in some 



