TliE PRINCIPLES OF BOTANY. 
717 
very minute. Herbaceous plants, shrubs or trees, with bulbs 
or tubers, or rhizomes, or fibrous roots. Leaves narrow, with 
parallel veins, njembranous, not articulated with the stem ; 
either sessile or with a narrow leafy petiole. 
This, a large order, is widely distributed, few parts of the 
world being without many conspicuous representatives. 
Bentham tabulates as many as seventeen native genera ; 
but many of these are by different authors referred to other 
orders, and amongst them Paris and Colchicum. Such wild 
natives as the tulip fritillary, lily of the valley, Solomon’s 
seal, squill, garlics, and others, sufficiently testify to the in- 
terest of our native species, whilst the lilies, tulips, 
hyacinths, aloes, and Yuccas of the garden and con- 
servatory, show forth their gorgeous hues and graceful 
forms in a most attractive manner. Well, then, may Pro- 
fessor Lindley rapturously remark with regard to them: — 
“ The beautiful creations which constitute the order of lilies 
would seem to be well known to all the world ; for what have 
been so long admired and universally cultivated as they ?” 
There are few gardens in which their bright colours, inter- 
esting forms, and sometimes delicious perfume, do not please 
and gladden us at different periods of the year, and fewer 
still in which some useful esculents of the order are not to be 
met with. 
The tendency of cultivated forms to run into varieties, as in 
the case of the tulip and others, has given rise to an extra- 
ordinary industry in Holland, where hundreds of people are 
employed in cultivating these “ bulbs,” and time was when 
fabulous prices were demanded for a single bulb. The 
growth of bulbs has now settled down into a fixed commerce, 
and travellers take their orders as regularly as would the re- 
presentative of a London or Birmingham house for any manu- 
factured article. 
Addison, in the ‘ Tatler,’ tells us of a tulip grower, that 
“ he valued the bed of flowers which lay before us, and was 
not above twenty yards in length, and two in breadth, more 
than he would the best hundred acres of land in England ; 
and added that it would have been worth twice the money it 
was, if a foolish cook-maid of his had not almost ruined him 
last winter, by mistaking a handful of tulip roots for a heap 
of onions, and by that means, said he, made me a dish of 
porridge that cost me above a thousand pounds sterling. He 
then showed me what he thought the finest of his tulips, 
which I found received their value from their rarity and odd- 
ness, and put me in mind of your great fortunes, which are 
not always the greatest beauties.” 
xli v. 50 
