120 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Oct. -Nov. 



pretty safe from the casual flower-picker; but the beautiful 

 C. acanle, inhabiting open woods is not so protected, and fre- 

 quently falls a victim to passcrsby. Consequently it is becom- 

 ing decidedly scarce in populated districts. This, however, 

 is due to an accident of civilization, and not to any natural 

 exigency. 



The peculiar flowering habits of Epipactis have been fre- 

 quently noticed before. One may sometimes find large numbers 

 of their beautifully veined leaves, but not a single blossom. 

 The dozen or so plants of E. pubescens which I know of around 

 here blossomed freely for several years past until this summer, 

 when only one plant put forth a flowering spike. On the other 

 hand, in a small swamp where I never saw more than two or 

 three of the plants in blossom before, this year I counted 132 

 fine spikes of E. repens, and later observation shows that they 

 have nearly all set seed. 



This raises the question as to what happens to the immense 

 quantity of seeds which an orchid produces every year. A rough 

 count of the seeds in a capsule of Cypripedium parviflomm showed 

 the number to be about 10,000. A single capsule of Haben- 

 aria hyperborea easily contains 2,000 seeds, and as a large plant 

 bears some 15 or 20 such capsules, the total number of seeds 

 to a plant is 30,000 to 40,000. A well grown specimen of the 

 small Liparis Loeselii produces 60,000 seeds in its six or eight 

 capsules. Microstylis unijolia never seems to get more than 

 two to four of its blossoms fertilized, but each of its tiny capsules 

 contain some 1,200 seeds. Large as these figures seem, they 

 are nothing to the almost incredible profusion of seeds grown 

 by some tropical species. A German botanist found 1,756,440 

 seeds in a single capsule of a Maxillaria, and the plant some- 

 times bore half a dozen such capsules. Darwin estimated 

 the seeds produced annually by an European species of Orchis 

 at 186,000, and shows that if all the seeds grew, by the third 

 generation the descendants of a single plant would be sufficient 

 to "clothe with one uniform green carpet the entire surface of 

 land throughout the globe." But, in spite of this immense 

 production of seed, orchids, even in the tropics are never very 

 plentiful when compared with other families, and in this country 

 they are always decidedly scarce. As they are practically all 

 cross-fertilized the number of bad seeds must be very small, 

 and admitting that they are somewhat fastidious in their various 

 habitats the saprophytic coral-roots, for instance, requiring 

 a quite special soil one would nevertheless imagine that a 

 dozen or so at least of the many thousands of seeds set free by 

 even a single plant would find some suitable soil near the parent. 

 But, nothing of the kind occurs. The same plants come up 



