plants during his tenure of office, amongst them the diminu- 

 tive, leafless Viscum that grows parasitically on a columnar 

 species of Cereus. At Mr. Burbidge's request, Mr. Warbur- 

 ton furnished the following particulars of the conditions 

 under which Chlorsea longibradeata grows wild: — " Unless I 

 confuse two kinds of orchids, it is the commonest I found. 

 The ground rises very rapidly from the sea-shore, much 

 broken into glens (quebrada) full of serub, and very rocky. 

 The rock is all granite or granitic, and the surface much 

 decomposed. Here and there you come across little 

 plateaux among the rough slopes and rising ground, with 

 very little soil on them formed of disintegrated granite, 

 clay and gravel. These plateaux usually have a very 

 sparse vegetation, consisting of bulbous plants, orchids, a 

 little grass, &c. Near the tops and on the tops grew 

 what my friends and I called the green orchis, in 

 hundreds. It always seemed to us that they grew in what 

 were about the driest places possible, where the ground 

 was so hard that it was difficult to dig them up with a 

 garden trowel." Mr. Warburton goes on to say that this 

 orchid, and other less abundant species, were usually of 

 stunted, dwarf growth, owing to the great dryness of the 

 soil, and the cultivated plants were much more vigorous. 

 Evidently, then, this is one of the numerous instances in 

 which plants are not found growing naturally where the 

 conditions are most favourable to full development. 



Descr.— A terrestrial, glabrous, tuberous-rooted herb, 

 twelve to eighteen inches high. Tubers cylindrical, a 

 quarter of an inch to one inch thick, the longest six to 

 eight inches long. Stem simple, thick, fleshy, clothed 

 throughout below the flowers with spathaceous, acute, 

 closely appressed leaves. Radical leaves somewhat rosu- 

 late, rather fleshy, broadly obovate-rotundate, three to 

 five inches long, two to two and a half inches broad, 

 recurved at the tip, longitudinally ribbed, with reticulated 

 venation between the ribs. Flowers one and a half to one 

 and one-third of an inch in diameter, becoming loosely 

 spicate ; spikes four to eight inches long ; bracts linear- 

 lanceolate, acuminate, somewhat shorter than the flower3 

 in cultivated specimens, somewhat longer in wild speci- 

 mens. Sepals white, dissimilar, the two lateral larger, 

 terminating in cylindrical, solid, fleshy, green, horn-like 



