To survive the long, dry, fiercely hot Mediterranean 
summer, plants must either have features enabling them 
to withstand dessication, such as small, hard or woolly 
leaves, or else disappear underground, having stored 
during the relatively mild moist winter and spring 
enough food in bulbs or tubers to give them a quick 
start into growth when the rains come. The storage 
organs of a number of Mediterranean orchids such as 
Orchis and Ophrys are paired rounded tubers which sug- 
gested testicles to the far from prudish Greeks, and they 
named these plants orchis (dpyes) and cynosorchis 
(kuvvocopxts) ‘dog’s testicle’ accordingly, a matter dis- 
cussed by Ames in his little essay on the ‘Origin of the 
term Orchis’ in Amer. Orchid Soc. Bull. 11: 146-147 
(1942). Dioscorides described the root as bulbous, with 
paired swellings, one full and solid, the other wrinkled 
and soft, and mentioned asa folk-tale the belief that men 
should eat the full one to beget sons but women the soft 
one to conceive daughters, presumably avoiding syn- 
chronisation! The extension of the word orchis and cog- 
nate words to tropical plants with long slender dangling 
roots would have seemed an absurdity for them, a con- 
tradiction in terms. The extension of the concept of 
‘orchid’ to cover such plants owes much to Carl Linn- 
aeus (after 1762 Carl von Linné) but did not originate 
with him. It developed out of the studies of his predeces- 
sors who had a feeling for affinities between plants as ex- 
pressed in overall resemblance. 
Thus Gaspard (or Caspar) Bauhin (1560-1624), who 
attempted in his Prnav (1628) to regulate the names of 
all the plants then known, devoted section 6 of his book 
Il mainly to orchids, with headings now unfamiliar such 
as Cynosorchis seu Testiculus canis, Orchis Serapias, ete., 
although somewhat spoiling the picture by associating 
Dens canis (ce. Hrythronium) and Orobanche with them. 
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