stylus cubitalis) and O.stateumatica (Zeuvine stateumatica) 
from Ceylonese specimens in Hermann’s herbarium, now 
in the British Museum (Natural History), his Z’piden- 
drum amabile (Phalaenopsis amabilis) and I. ensifolium 
(Cymbidium ensifolium) trom Chinese specimens collected 
by Osbeck and his 14. Vanilla (Vanilla planifolia) trom 
cultivated material and 24. nodosum (Brassavola nodosa) 
from cultivated material and illustrations, but the other 
9 he knew only from illustrations published by Rheede 
and Kaempfer. Wisely he kept these little-known species 
in a single genus, Mpidendrum; he could record their 
existence, give them names but add nothing to an under- 
standing of them. This had to wait for Olof Swartz 
(1760-1858), who studied many species while in the 
West Indies, Robert Brown (1778-1858), who studied 
many in Australia, Carl Ludwig Blume (1796-1862), 
who studied many others in Java, and John Lindley 
(1799-1865), who never visited the tropics but studied 
their products more conveniently in the glasshouses of 
Kngland and published some 120 currently accepted 
genera. 
Assessment of Linnaeus’s main publications relating 
to orchids depends upon one’s viewpoint and this is con- 
ditioned by both the knowledge and the scientific fash- 
ions of the time. If, forexample, we imagine Carl Linn- 
aeus as a Harvard student submitting his account of 
Orchidaceae to Professor Ames as a thesis, which ad- 
mittedly requires some imagination, we can be sure poor 
student Linnaeus would have been taken to task for the 
superficiality of his work, for ignoring so many minute 
floral details in his definition of genera, for failing to 
separate groups which, in the Professor’s eyes, were ob- 
viously distinct; Linnaeus would have been told to ex- 
amine their floral structure with greater care. On the 
other hand, if we imagine Oakes Ames as an Uppsala 
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