346 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



plants were beginning to be grown in numbers in Europe : " You 

 would enter the house full of orchids with eager curiosity, as though 

 it were some shrine Avhere a tangible mystery was to be unfolded. 

 The method of growth without soil, the aerial roots, the heavy 

 atmosphere, the abnormal leaves, the strange aspect, would grip 

 you all at once, and if blossoms were open with their peculiar forms, 

 fleshy petals, somber colors, and penetrating perfumes, you stood 

 overwhelmed at the display and at the patience of the gardener." 



What used to cause so much astonishment at the method of growth 

 of orchids resulted from a peculiarity of these plants which was then 

 little understood, namely, that they are children of the air, or, in 

 other words, epiphytes. In Europe we know but little of plants of 

 this class, for we have only the lichens and mosses upon the trunks 

 of our trees to give us any idea of them. In the warmer regions of 

 the globe, on the contrary, this mode of existence is widespread, and 

 for many ages the seeds of certain species, embracing sometimes 

 almost entire families, like the orchids and bromeliads, have been 

 able to solve victorioush?^ the delicate problem of existence imposed 

 upon an organism compelled to live and grow upon the branch of a 

 tree, exposed to the burning rays of the sun, which strive to scorch it, 

 and in great danger of dying from starvation in consequence of lack 

 of food to supply its demands. This epiphytic life attracted the 

 attention of Osbeck, who collected plants in Asia and Malaysia for 

 Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. He sent the latter a great num- 

 ber of curious types, which were all described by the celebrated 

 Swedish botanist under the name of Epidendrum, he wishing to de- 

 note thus by the generic name the fact that they had the common 

 characteristic of growing upon trees. 



A Portuguese missionary, Loureiro, a distinguished botanist who 

 studied the flora of Indo-China, was very strongly impressed by the 

 habit of growth of Aerides odoratum^ which lived " freelj^ suspended 

 in the air with neither food nor any base, either terrestrial or 

 aquatic." In 1812 Loddiges, publishing the first catalogue of orchids 

 cultivated in the hothouses of Hackney, England, declared that he 

 had received Oncidimn ensifolmm from a traveler returning from 

 Montevideo, who had seen the plant flower, deprived of all soil, in 

 the cabin he occupied on shipboard. 



Horticulturists tried from the first to reproduce artificially the 

 conditions for aerial life, and it is thus that the celebrated Joseph 

 Banks, in 1817, described the first attempts at culture in frames sus- 

 pended from the roof of the greenhouse. Treatment of orchids in 

 pots with some sort of earth, which had been the method employed 

 in the first attempts at cultivation at the end of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, was altogether barbarous and inevitably resulted in the death 



