1893. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 327 



A Remarkable Orchid. 

 Mr. F. W. Moore, the enthusiastic Curator of the Glasnevin 

 Gardens, Dublin, has, according to the Orchid Review, recently 

 flowered, for the first time in Europe, a plant of Coryanthes Wolfii. 

 This remarkable genus attracted the attention of Charles Darwin, 

 who gives a figure of the flower, and describes its strange method 

 of fertilisation, in his work on the Fertilisation of Orchids. It will be 

 remembered that drops of Hquid are excreted and caught in a bucket- 

 shaped development of the Hp, that bees struggling for a place on 

 the edges of the bucket get pushed in, and their wings being wetted 

 b)' the liquid, have no means of escape except by a narrow passage 

 which is arched over and temporarily closed by the anther and 

 stigmatic surface. The present species comes from Ecuador, and 

 was named by Mr. Lehmann, the German Consul in the United 

 States of Colombia, well-known as an energetic botanist and 

 orchidologist. He says, writing in the Gardeners' Chronicle — " It 

 grows very sparingly, mostly on cacao trees, all over the littoral 

 districts of the Guayas, where it flowers in February and March, 

 when these level lands are mostly inundated. During this season it 

 is beyond the power of man to penetrate the woods there — a 

 circumstance that accounts for the plant not having been seen before. 

 It produces thick upright flower-spikes, 40 to 50 cm. high, with three 

 to six large, wonderfully-constructed flowers, which are yellow, 

 mottled, and stained with brownish red. There are but few plants 

 in the entire vegetable kingdom which are more interesting, and 

 which afford such a varied amount of material for the student of 

 vegetable physiology." The plant has a strong attraction for ants, 

 numbers of which surround its root masses, and are apparently 

 essential to its well-being, as in their absence it seems to do badly. 

 This myrmecophily was observed not only in the tropical South 

 American forests, but under cultivation. The ant is a small species 

 of Myrmica, with a strong aromatic smell, and a bite so severe that 

 it requires some courage to meddle with the plant. 



Names of Orchids. 

 In the same journal, which, by the way, contains much to interest 

 the orchid-lover, are descriptions by Mr. Rolfe of new species of 

 Masdcvallia, Laelia, and Maxillaria which have flowered under cultiva- 

 tion, and also a note of warning to those who are apt to trifle with 

 nomenclature. Cypripedium spectabile is one of the best known and 

 most beautiful of Cypripediums, but it has no right to this name, 

 under which Salisbury described it in 1791, as in so doing he ignored 

 two earlier names, C.alhum of Alton (1789), which seems to have been 

 discarded as inapplicable because the lip is rose-coloured, and 

 C. regime under which it was described by Walter in his " Flora 

 Caroliniana" in 1788. Cypripedium regino', as we must therefore call it, 

 and none will deny the suitability of the name, has a remarkable 



