5« 



CULTURE OF THE TUBEROSE. 



been inconceivably difficult to exclude various animals, 

 both carnivorous and herbivorous, from the immediate 

 precincts of human habitations ; driven ae they now are 

 from every populous country, we can form but a very imper- 

 fect idea of their tremendous power and strength in warmer 

 subsequent to climates, while thinly inhabited. Hence the progress, even 

 agriculture. ^^ Agriculture, was in all probability for a long period slow 

 and interrupted: years and years must have elapsed, before 

 her younger and more delicate sister, Horticulture, ventured 

 to appear; though, to plant a clump of bananas, which 

 would give immediate shade, and to perfume the surround- 

 ing air with the fragrance of an orange grove, independent 

 of the fruit these two vegetables afford, must have been na- 

 tural, one would think, to many a savage of finer feelings, the 

 moment his residence became fixed. 

 Tuberose re- To leave the language of fancy for that of fact, I know no 

 as'urofitabVe. ornamental plant, which seems to me more deserving of 

 cultivation in the warmer soils of this kingdom, or that 

 would repay the labour attending it with greater profits, 

 than the tuberose. 

 First account The first account that I find of the tuberose, is in TEcluse's 

 of this flower, jjjgtory of Plants, where it appears that on the 1st of De- 

 cember 1594, he received a specimen of it, in very bad con- 

 dition, from Bernard Paludanus, a physician at Rome, to 

 whom it was sent by the celebrated Simon de Tovar, of Se- 

 ville. It certainly had not then been many years in Europe, 

 ^nd Linn6, in his Hortus Chffortianus, on this head refers us 

 to Plumier's Genera Plantarura, p. 35, who says it was first 

 Supposed from brought by Father Minuti, from the East Indies, into the 

 theEastlndies, g^jj^a^Qp Peiresc's garden at Boisgencier, near Toulon. It 

 is much more probable, however, tbat it was introduced a^ 

 More probably an earlier period, and from America, for no author describes 

 T^ ' it as wild in the East Indies. Loureiro only found it ci^lti- 

 vated in the gardens of Cochin China, and Kumph says it 

 was unknown in the Island of Amboyna, till the Dutch c^r« 

 ried it there from Batavia, in I674. On the contrary, Ka-» 

 mel informs us, that it was brought to the Island of Luzone, 

 by the Spaniards, from Mexico; and Parkinson, in I65Q, 

 tells us, that the plants, which he describes as two species, 

 Natives cf the «' both grow naturally in the West Indies, whence being 



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