112 ORCHIDS. 
XIX.—THE ORCHIDS. 
Tue order of orchideous plants is one of the most attractive 
as well to the scientific investigator as to the horticulturist. 
The magnificence of a multitude of its species, the facilty with 
which most of the epiphytal sorts admit of transit from their 
secluded natural haunts to wide distances, the grand or odd form 
of the flowers of many and their often gay or gorgeous colorations 
have rendered them prized beyond most other kinds of plants for 
the conservatories of the cultivator, the album or atlas of the 
painting artist and the drying books of the collector of native 
plants. In extratropic latitudes like ours nearly all Orchids are 
terrestrial and in still colder zones they are exclusively so, for 
even the glacier regions of Alps and polar countries are not quite 
without these lovely plants. Thus we possess only three epiphytal 
species in this colony, but not less than sixty well marked terres- 
trial Orchideze. The ordinal name applies to the usually double 
tubers of these kinds of plants. The genera of Orchidez are 
primarily distinguished by the consistence of their pollen-masses ; 
in ours they are waxy in Dendrobium, Sarcochilus and Dipodium, 
granular in Gastrodia, powdery in the numerous others of our 
genera. The two first-mentioned genera comprise the epiphytal 
plants indigenous to our colony ; these are so called, because they 
grow usually on the stems and branches of trees, and never on 
ordinary soil, although our two Dendrobiums, both from East 
Gippsland, are content to vegetate on mossy rocks. The name 
signifies that the plants of this genus live on trees. Our Den- 
drobium speciosum is a large showy plant, well known through 
conservatory-culture, hardy also in any shady and moist rockeries 
of our lowland. 
Dendrobium striolatum is illustrated as a representative of 
the order, the main-criteria of which consist in the outer and 
inner row of sepals (or calyx-segments) being mostly unequal 
and petal-like, one of the inner sepals (except in Thelymitra) 
shaped very differently to the rest (called lip or labellum), 
