52 ABOUT ORCHIDS. 
devised by one or other species to serve its turn 
may well come to fancy that orchids are reasoning 
things. 
At least, many keep the record of their history 
inform unmistakable. Here is a Cattleya which 
I purchased last autumn, suspecting it to be rare 
and valuable, though nameless ; I paid rather less 
than one shilling. The poor thing tells me that 
some cruel person bought it five years ago—an 
imported piece, with two pseudo-bulbs. They 
still remain, towering like columns of old-world 
glory above an area of shapeless ruin. To speak 
in mere prose—though really the conceit is not 
extravagant—these fine bulbs, grown in their 
native land, of course, measure eight inches high 
by three-quarters of an inch diameter. In the first 
season, that malheureux reduced their progeny to 
a stature of three and a half inches by the foot- 
rule ; next season, to two inches; the third, to an 
inch andahalf. By this time the patient creature 
had convinced itself that there was something 
radically wrong in the circumstances attending its 
normal head, and tried a fresh departure from the 
stock—a ‘‘back growth,’ as we call it, after the 
fashion I have described. In the third year then, 
there were two heads. In the fourth year, the 
chief of them had dwindled to less than one inch 
