168 ABOUT ORCHIDS. 
also, is a lovely thing, with narrow dagger-like 
sepals and petals, creamy-yellow, spotted black, 
lip mauve or violet, edged with pale yellow. 
Of the many hot Dendrobiums, Australia sup- 
plies a good proportion. There is D. begibbum, of 
course, too well known for description ; it dwells 
on the small islands in Torres Straits. This 
species flowered at Kew so early as 1824, but the 
plant died. Messrs. Loddiges, of Hackney, re- 
introduced it thirty years later. D. /Johannis, 
from Queensland, brown and yellow, streaked with 
orange, the flowers curiously twisted. D. super- 
biens, from Torres Straits, rosy purple, edged with 
white, lip crimson. Handsomest of all by far is 
D. phalenopsis. It throws out along, slender spike 
from the tip of the pseudo-bulb, bearing six or 
more flowers, three inches across. The sepals are 
lance-shaped, and the petals, twice as broad, rosy- 
lilac, with veins of darker tint; the lip, arched 
over by its side lobes, crimson-lake in the throat, 
paler and striped at the mouth. It was first sent 
home by Mr. Forbes, of Kew Gardens, from Timor 
Laiit, in 1880. But Mr. Fitzgerald had made 
drawings of a species substantially the same, some 
years before, from a plant he discovered on the 
property of Captain Bloomfield, Balmain, in 
Queensland, nearly a thousand miles south of 
