like that about the morus multicaulis, or the petroleum
mania of to-day, but much more intense. It began in the year 1635, and
went out with an explosion in the year 1837.

This tulip business is, I believe, the only speculative excitement in
history whose subject-matter did not even claim to have any real value.
Petroleum is worth some shillings a gallon for actual use for many
purposes. Stocks always claim to represent some real trade or business.
The morus multicaulis was to be as permanent a source of wealth as corn,
and was expected to produce the well known mercantile substance of silk.
But nobody ever pretended that tulips could be eaten, or manufactured,
or consumed in any way of practical usefulness. They have not one single
quality of the kind termed useful. They have nothing desirable except
the beauty of a peculiarly short-lived blossom. You can do absolutely
nothing with them except to look at them. A speculation in them is
exactly as reasonable as one in butterflies would be.

In the course of about one year, 1634-5, the tulip frenzy, after having
increased for fifteen or twenty years with considerable speed, came to a
climax, and poisoned the whole Dutch nation. Prices had at the end of
this short period risen from high to extravagant, and from extravagant
to insane. High and low, counts, burgomasters, merchants, shop-keepers,
servants, shoe-blacks, all were buying and selling tulips like mad. In
order to make the commodity of the day accessible to all, a new weight
was invented, called a perit, so small that there were about eight
thousand of them in one pound avoirdupois, and a single tulip root
weighing from half an ounce to an ounce, would contain from 200 to 400
of these perits. Thus, anybody unable to buy a whole tulip, could buy a
perit or two, and have what the lawyers call an "undivided interest" in
a root. This way of owning shows how utterly unreal was the pretended
value. For imagine a small owner attempting to take his own perits and
put them in his pocket. He would make a little hole in the tulip-root,
would probably kill it, and would certainly obtain a little bit of
utterly worthless pulp for himself, and no value at all. There was a
whole code of business regulations made to meet the peculiar needs of
the tulip business, besides, and in every town were to be found
"tulip-notaries," to conduct the legal part of the business, take
acknowledgments of deeds, note protests, &c.

To say that