The divisions of this perianth, six in number, may, in truth, be considered as _petals_; they are detached down to the base, and full in proportion as the pistil is developed. The latter is composed of three stigmata, attached, without the intermediary of a stylus (sessile stigmata), to a free ovary (that is, an ovary not joined to the perianth), which, as it develops, forms a capsule with three angular projections marking so many lobes; each of these lobes includes a great number of compressed seeds. As in all the Liliaceæ, and in many other vegetable families, the stamens, six in number, are _hypogynous_,--that is to say, inserted at the base of the division of the perianth. The stem, nearly two feet in height, bears a single flower only: the leaves are lanceolate, like all of the family, and the root is formed of a bulb, with thin and brownish-coloured external _tunicæ_. Is the wild tulip an original species, or only a degenerate variety of the cultivated tulip (_Tulipa Gesneriana_)? The question is one not very easily solved. It is generally admitted that the cultivated tulip,--which everybody knows,--was introduced into Europe from the East, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. It is, at all events, certain that none of our older botanists speak of our wild tulip. Dodonnée himself refers to the Eastern tulip only, of which he was the first to give, in his "Historia Stirpium," a tolerable delineation. A circumstance which would favour the belief that the tulip was imported from the East is the Oriental derivation of its name: _tulipa_, in Italian _tulipano_, comes to us, it is said, from the Turkish _tuliband_, or the Persian _dulbend_, whence is obtained, by corruption, _turban_, the characteristic head-gear of the Orientals. Thus, at bottom, _tulip_ and _turban_ are the same word, only altered in form. * * * * * Who does not know with what a glory of colours the skill of our horticulturists has succeeded in clothing the tulip? Inasmuch as the cultivated species bears the distinctive addition of _Gesneriana_,--and of this species all existing tulips are but varieties,--we might reasonably suppose that Gesner, the celebrated Swiss naturalist (who died at Zurich, aged sixty-nine, in 1565), was the first to speak of it. But he makes no allusion to it in his "Historia Plantarum" (printed at Bâle in 1541); he only refers to it in his "Additions" to the works of Valerius Cordus, published in 1561. We subjoin a literal translation of the words of Conrad Gesner:-- "In the year 1559, at the beginning of April, I saw at Augsburg, in the garden of F. H. Herwart, magistrate of that town, a plant whose seed had been brought from Constantinople, or, according to some, from Cappadocia. It was called _tulip_." About the same epoch, this plant was cultivated at Vienna, in the gardens of some wealthy amateurs; whence several tulip-bulbs were afterwards sent into England.