XVIII.— THE FRITILLARY. 
Fritillaria Meleagris Linne. 
C ONSIDERING how conspicuously beautiful this species is, and how abundant 
it is in the localities in our south-eastern counties where it is wild, it is strange 
that it should not have been definitely recorded as a British plant until the eighteenth 
century. Many — though, perhaps, not all — of its numerous popular names being 
clearly corruptions of book-names are also undoubtedly of recent origin, and some 
of them well exemplify the stages by which misunderstood appellations are 
phonetically transmuted or ignorantly misapplied. 
It has a small, roundish, lobed bulb of two or three thick scales, from which the 
slender tapering aerial stem rises for nearly a foot. It is very rarely branched and 
bears, chiefly towards its upper part, a few scattered, slightly glaucous, linear leaves, 
six to eight inches long, from a quarter to half an inch in width, channelled and 
pointed. 
The flower-bud stands erect ; but, before opening, the solitary terminal bell-shaped 
or Tulip-like flower hangs inverted from an arched stalk. The six perianth-leaves 
are narrow, oblong, about an inch and a half long, pointed, with slightly inflexed 
points. They are commonly finely chequered in alternating squares of pink and a 
deep dull crimson ; and similar chequering, though not universal in the genus, being, 
for example, absent in the familiar Crown Imperial ( Fritillaria imperialis L.) of our 
gardens, occurs in other species. In the Kennet meadows above Reading a white 
variety is almost as abundant as the red, and a faint chequering is discernible through 
the white of the perianth-leaves. 
Within the bell, near the base of each perianth-leaf, is a nectary, which, in the 
British species, is narrow and linear ; but the flower is scentless. The six stamens 
are attached to the bases of the perianth-leaves, below the nectaries ; they have 
subulate filaments and yellow introrse anthers about half an inch long which do not 
mature until after the stigmas. The three carpels are united in an oblong, three-lobed 
and three-chambered, superior ovary, closely packed with a double row of ovules in 
each chamber, springing from the central placental axis. There is a single, 
three-grooved style, diverging above into three stigmatic lobes, which hang lower 
than the anthers in the pendulous flowers and have their receptive surfaces inwards, 
in a position, that is, but little favourable to self-pollination. 
After pollination, the capsule, as it enlarges, rises once more into the erect 
position occupied by the flower-bud, the species thus affording an excellent example 
of what have been termed by Hansgirg gamotropic and carpotropic curvatures of the 
flower-stalk. 
The plant is particularly abundant in the valley of the Thames and its tributaries, 
as in Christ Church Meadows, Oxford, at Minety, on the border of North Wilts, in 
the neighbourhood of Aylesbury, and formerly between Kew and Mortlake ; but in 
