Though florists have published numerous catalogues of the species of the tulip, botanists are acquainted only with two, or at most three, of which scarcely one is indigenous in Europe[43]. All those found in our gardens have been propagated from the species named after that learned man, to whom natural history is so much indebted, the Linnæus of the sixteenth century, Conrad Gesner, who first made the tulip known by a botanical description and a figure. In his additions to the works of Valerius Cordus, he tells us that he saw the first in the beginning of April 1559, at Augsburg, in the garden of the learned and ingenious counsellor John Henry Herwart. The seeds had been brought from Constantinople, or, according to others, from Cappadocia. This flower was then known in Italy under the name of tulipa, or tulip, which is said to be of Turkish extraction, and given to it on account of its resembling a turban[44]. Balbinus asserts that Busbequius brought the first tulip-roots to Prague, from which they were afterwards spread all over Germany[45]. This is not improbable; for Busbequius says, in a letter written in 1554, that this flower was then new to him; and it is known that besides coins and manuscripts he collected also natural curiosities, and brought them with him from the Levant. Nay, he tells us that he paid very dear to the Turks for these tulips; but I do not find he anywhere says that he was the first who brought them from the East. In the year 1565 there were tulips in the garden of M. Fugger, from whom Gesner wished to procure some[46]. They first appeared in Provence, in France, in the garden of the celebrated Peyresc, in the year 1611[47]. After the tulip was known, Dutch merchants, and rich people at Vienna, who were fond of flowers, sent at different times to Constantinople for various kinds. The first roots planted in England were sent thither from Vienna, about the end of the sixteenth century, according to Hakluyt[48]; who is, however, wrong in ascribing to Clusius the honour of having first introduced them into Europe; for that naturalist only collected and described all the then known species. These flowers, which are of no further use than to ornament gardens, which are exceeded in beauty by many other plants, and whose duration is short and very precarious, became, in the middle of the 17th century, the object of a trade such as is not to be met with in the history of commerce, and by which their price rose above that of the most precious metals. An account of this trade has been given by many authors; but by all late ones it has been misrepresented. People laugh at the Tulipomania[49], because they believe that the beauty and rarity of the flowers induced florists to give such extravagant prices: they imagine that the tulips were purchased so excessively dear in order to ornament gardens; but this supposition is false, as I shall show hereafter.