77 



The majority of the Dendrobiums referred to are at home in 

 regions where they are subject to au annual period, shorter or 

 longer, of drought and have no leaves then. If such plants are 

 transported to a moist and evenly warm climate, it often occurs 

 that the inflorescences do not develop, or only by way of ex- 

 ception, and merely leafshoots are born. An instance of this is 

 furnished by D. nobile, which plant grows well at Buitenzorg, 

 but only exceptionally, and then only in very dry years, flowers, 

 while the stalks are pregnant with root-bearing young plants. 



Some years ago the Buitenzorg Gardens received a collection 

 of D. Wardianum of which the leafless stalks were not slow in 

 producing shoots from the nodes. In normal circumstances there 

 would be born inflorescences, which most probably had already 

 been preformed as such; as it was, there did not appear — evi- 

 dently owing to the modified conditions — a single inflorescence, 

 but on the contrary all sorts of transitions from these to leafy 

 shoots. The above information may serve to make some of the 

 following deviations better understood. 



Two flowers (some other appeared to have been too much injured 

 to allow examination) both show coalescences in the perianth, viz. 



h^ flower: the upper sepal has grown together with the left 

 one. The two lateral petals coalesce with the labellum at the 

 same time uniting their upper margins. The top of the labellum 

 is slanting. 



2nd flower : labellum normal, the other five parts of the perianth 

 form one whole which envelopes the labellum like a gutter. 

 This gutter ends into two teeth separated by a notch, but each 

 of the teeth shows two secondary little excrescences. The sup- 

 position that the gutter is composed of 5 parts is corroborated 

 by the presence of six vascular bundles in the petiole, although 

 the median sepal does not project beyond the notch. 



Dendrobium superbum Rchb. f. 



Habitat Borneo, Manilla and the Moluccas. 



Coll. January 1902. 



Something like the above though not to such a degree was 

 observed in D. super^bum. 



