‘LILIES AND ORCHIDS 137 
there will not be self-fertilisation, for the pollen cannot 
well climb up to the lip overhanging it. 
The Orchids, or many of them, have adopted a most 
elaborate scheme to make sure of the carriers doing the 
work properly. Instead of casually dusting insects, they 
send out their pollen in masses, adjusted at a particular 
point, to the insects. 
If we look at the general structure of the flower it 
will seem at first that all rule has been abandoned, and 
that they cannot be reduced to symmetry; but if you 
look a little more closely you will see that the three-fold 
arrangement has not been quite lost sight of. We may 
take as a type the broad-leaved Helleborine, an orchid 
with greenish-purple flowers, which I have found in woods 
in Wales. You will find a more elaborate description of 
it than I can afford space for here in Kerner and Oliver’s 
Natural History of Plants, a book you should by all 
means borrow, and, if you can 
get it for your own, you are 
lucky. 
You wiil see at once that the 
six parts of the perianth are pre- 
sent, the outer three more or less 
ordinary, but one of the inner 
three scooped out and swollen 
in a most extraordinary way. It 
is this one petal that is responsible 
for almost all the freakish appearance of the orchids, and 
if you follow the advice just given, and go to Kew, you 
will be amazed by its various transformations. Now a 
deep pocket, now like a bee, now like a spider, and now 
ribboned out into a crest, it takes twenty different shapes, 
each more fantastic than the last. The technical name 
