has to be expended on the transportation of orchids. It sometimes happens that on opening the cases on arrival in England. a valuable collection is found to have rotted en route, and the importer realises that hundreds of pounds have been spent and lives risked, to secure worthless roots! The orchid importer needs a stout heart and unlimited enterprise, and some of us may well wonder how he manages to make the business pay at all when we think of the ambassadors he employs in nearly every clime, of the funds which he has occasionally to place at their disposal, and of the fact that one loss may involve a sum equal to a fair annual income. On the other hand, if he is the lucky possessor of a variety of value, the plant creates the greatest enthusiasm in orchid circles, and is consequently a source of immense profit.
Odontoglossum cirrosum.
We have in these pages taken a rapid glance at the more popular, it may even be said the more romantic, side of the work of orchid collection. Enough has been said, we hope, to show why the study of orchidology is a liberal education. What a wealth of natural history of the most fascinating kind it opens up! Nothing more striking is recorded in nature than the manner in which the bee fertilises the orchid, to give the least adequate account of which would involve another half-dozen pages of this magazine. The majority of us probably would be surprised to learn that but few orchids grow in the ground. They are found often high up on the branches of some monarch of the primeval forest, and the proverbial needle in the bundle of hay might be discovered half a dozen times over whilst the collector is searching for a single plant. Others appear, however, quite low down. The tree-growing orchid is an epiphyte. That is to say, though it lives on the tree it makes the branch a resting-place only. It gets its nourishment from the atmosphere and not the tree, as does the mistletoe for instance. One orchid, a Diacrium, actually grows on rocks within reach of the spray from the salt sea waves.
To follow in the footsteps of the collector is to acquire a considerable knowledge of the countries of the earth. Orchids luxuriate in warm and humid places, thousands of feet above the level of the sea. They have out-distanced the Anglo-Saxon in the number of lands they have colonised. You may find them in Africa, in North, Central, and South America, in Australia and New Zealand, in Asia, in Malagascar, in Europe—everywhere except in very cold climates. One day the orchid hunter may be on the high road of civilisation, pursuing his quest like an ordinary tourist; another he will have plunged into regions dark as darkest Africa, as far removed from modern conditions as the dwarfs of Stanley's limitless forest. In the search for a single orchid he comes across many varieties of the human race, and on a thousand points connected with modes of life, of governments, of the relations of places one to other, far and near, he is better informed than many an arm-chair specialist.
