Daffodil
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Daffodil. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a lily-like flowering herb belonging to the same family as the iris, or blue flag, and the blue-eyed grass. The flower scape springs from a bulb; the corolla is noticeable for a trumpet-shaped hood, rising in its center. Narcissus, the botanical name, includes daffodils and jonquils. The common daffodil is a meadow plant eighteen inches high, found from Sweden and England to Spain and Austria. Wordsworth's delight in the daffodil is worth a place here: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils,-- Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering, dancing in the breeze. There are a large number of varieties of daffodils in cultivation. Among the more interesting is the hoop-petticoat daffodil, which has solitary, erect, yellow flowers. Another variety, the rush daffodil, has a short crown and slender, drooping tube. Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall, And narcissi, the fairest among them all, Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess, Till they die of their own dear loveliness.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the popular name of a European plant which is one of the earliest ornaments of our gardens, being favorite objects of cultivation. It belongs to the order Amarylliadaceæ. Many varieties of the daffodil are in cultivation, differing chiefly in bulk and in the form of the flower, which is of a bright primrose-yellow color. There are other forms of the name in local or partial use. See NARCISSUS.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry places the daffodil in the same family as the iris and blue-eyed grass; Collier's 1921 has it right, in the Amaryllidaceae, and that is where modern classification keeps it, in the subfamily Amaryllidoideae. The garden side has expanded enormously: the international daffodil register now runs to tens of thousands of named cultivars, against the "large number of varieties" of 1910. The biggest genuinely new fact is medical rather than horticultural ound extan alkaloid found in narcissus bulbs, is manufactured as a drug for Alzheimer's disease, approved in the United States in 2001, and daffodils have been grown in Wales partly as a crop for it. Wordsworth's wild daffodil, meanwhile, has become scarcer in British meadows as old grassland has been ploughed or built over.
Written for this edition, 2026.