A HISTORY OF THE SPECIES OF CEOCUS. 



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Crocus, but cannot do so in a calcareous region. It does not 

 follow from that circumstance that the Crocus cannot be culti- 

 vated to greater advantage in a much richer soil ; the magni- 

 ficent bulbs raised in the Dutch gardens prove that it can. C. 

 vermis is often found in blackish earth on the Alps, and it will 

 grow well in peat in the garden, where indeed Anemone Pulsa- 

 tilla, which grows wild in absolute chalk, thrives better in peat 

 than in any other soil ; but most of the Crocuses I have seen 

 appear to inhabit a reddish ferruginous moderately strong earth 

 upon a dry subsoil. The same soil might perhaps not suit them 

 on an ill-drained flat, and a very different compost might lead 

 to a more vigorous development in a garden where the plants 

 would be protected from overgrowth in the early spring. 



The germen or future seed-capsule of the Crocus is always 

 under ground, communicating with the limb of the flower by a 

 long tube, and borne upon a scape or stalk, which in some 

 species is very short and scarcely discernible at the time of 

 flowering ; in others, raising the germen near to the surface of 

 the ground. In all it becomes lengthened while the seed is ad- 

 vancing, and rises above ground before its maturity. In some 

 species this scape is naked, in others it is enveloped by a mem- 

 branous sheath or involucre. The genus is therefore separable 

 into two broad divisions, those with the flower-stalk naked, and 

 those with an involucre. No naked Crocus has been yet de- 

 scribed west of Italy, supposing C. carpetanus, which I have 

 never seen, to be involucrate. Sir E. Smith, who was ignorant 

 of all the peculiarities of Croci, named the Pyrenean Crocus, 

 nudiflorus, though in fact involucrate and having the least naked 

 flower of all the genus ; for, while C. speciosus has the portion 

 of the tube above ground really naked, no involucre, and the 

 spathe concealed within the leaf-sheaths, the tube of C. Pyre- 

 neus is conspicuously clothed by a prolonged green spathe. The 

 name nudiflorus must therefore have been rejected, even if 

 Pyreneus had not had the priority. In Italy the annulate 

 Crocus with a hard smooth bulb-coat and separable rings which 

 are the base of other perishable coats, begins to make its ap- 

 pearance with a naked scape amongst those with an involucre ; 

 on the other hand, I am mot aware that any involucrate Crocus 

 is found in Asia, unless it be perhaps C. Pallasianus, to which I 

 imagine that a dried specimen from the hills near Tifflis, which 

 I at first mistook for a variety of versicolor, must be nearly 

 allied. 



I have subdivided the two prime divisions by the texture of 

 the bulb-coats into membranaceous, parallel-fibred, and reticulate ; 

 and I have admitted intermediate divisions of subparallel where 



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