02 THE PLANT WORLD. 



for the last fifty years or more. The manuals of Torrey, Wood, Gray 

 and Chapman are arranged on this system, and it has therefore become 

 as familiar almost as the A B C's. It is the displacement of this system 

 that occasioned the protest stated in the first paragraph. 



During all the years that the Candollean system has been in use, 

 facts have been accumulating in paleontology, histology and morphol- 

 ogy, which made it clearer and clearer that this was not a perfect or 

 logical arrangement. It was shown to be wrong in many particulars, 

 to be based on insufficient data, and the time was ripe for a new dis- 

 pensation which came in the form of an epoch-making work known 

 as The Natural Families of Plaiits, by Engler and Prantl, two emi- 

 nent German systematists. They have made a rearrangement of the 

 entire vegetable kingdom, beginning with simplest and passing to 

 the more and more complex, a system which is undoubtedly to be, at 

 least in its main features, the system of the immediate future. It is 

 thus seen that this new classification is not revolutionary and useless, 

 but is simply a step in the progress of botanical science that was de- 

 manded as an expression of the present state of our knowledge. 

 Without such steps botany would stand still. 



NOTES hm NEV5. 



Notwithstanding the fact that the orchids form a vast group, 

 numbering some four hundred genera and between five and six thous- 

 and species, they are usually rather scarce plants; that is, they are 

 rarely so abundant as to become dominant elements in the landscape. 

 This is the more remarkable from the fact that they are known to 

 produce seeds in the greatest abundance. Thus according to Darwin 

 the little English orchid ( Orchis niaculata), which is not greatly un- 

 like our little Orchis spectabilis^ produces as many as 6,200 seeds in 

 capsule, and as a plant often bears thirty capsules, the total product 

 would be 186,300 seeds. This is insignificant when compared with 

 certain exotic species. Scott found that the capsule of an Acropera 

 contained 371,250 seeds, and judging from the number of flowers, a 

 single plant would sometimes yield above seventy-four millions of 

 seeds Miiller found 1,756,440 seeds in a single capsule of a Maxillaria, 

 and the same plant sometimes bore half a dozen such capsules, or 

 about 10,500,000 seeds. Darwin estimates that if the seeds all came 

 to maturity, the great-grand children of a single plant of Orchis mac- 

 jilata would clothe with one uniform green carpet the entire land 

 surface of the globe. Will not some of our readers undertake to in- 

 vestigate the seed-producing powers of our native orchids, and give 

 the results ? 



