I 



HYACINTH CULTURE AT HAARLEM IN THE 

 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



Chapter I. — Introduction 



Saint-Simon, writing in the year 1768, declares there were at 

 that time in Haarlem nearly two thousand named varieties 

 of the hyacinth, and we may suppose they had already been 

 about forty years in cultivation on a soil which seemed 

 particularly adapted for the purpose, — a fine upper stratum 

 of grey sand, superposed by the action of the sea on a thin 

 subsoil of peat, so that Nature prepared, it seems, many 

 thousand years in advance to produce the delicately-tinted 

 and exquisitely -scented flower, which rises as if by magic 

 out of the cold earth in a few weeks 1 space. 



One well-named variety, " Sceptre of David," reminds 

 one of the long moral preparation of one people chosen out 

 of the nations of the earth (a stiff soil to work), before the 

 long-desired of the hills should come, when there should 

 come a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower should 

 rise up out of his root. 



If there are " correspondences " in the material and 

 spiritual worlds, the flower that cometh up in a day has 

 its root in the ages. 



The hyacinth is one of the most perfect results of man's 



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