ORCHIDS AND EVOLUTION COSTANTIN. 349 



cultural establishments in England which import every year from 

 one hundred to two hundred thousand plants.^ 



The reader may perhaps ask, when he reads these fantastic figures, 

 why so much labor is expended, and he will think that it would be 

 much easier to sow the seeds, which can be obtained by the thousands. 

 This is exactly what all the horticulturists tried to do in the early 

 days of orchid culture, but all their attempts were without result, and 

 for a long time the secret of germination was unknown. The seeds 

 have peculiar characteristics that are not found in those of other 

 plants. They are extremely small, without albumen, inclosed in a 

 tegument, and formed of a simple minute mass of similar, undifferen- 

 tiated cells. The minuteness of the seeds is compensated for by their 

 great number, and a mature capsule contains an enormous number 

 of seeds, which are described as scobiform, they being thus compared 

 to sawdust. Evidently if it had been known how to make the seeds 

 germinate, orchids could have been multiplied in a prodigious fash- 

 ion, and they would have become among our commonest plants. That 

 they have not become so is because for a long time it was impossible 

 to revive life in the seeds. We read in an important work published 

 in 1822 by the French botanist Du Petit Thouars, Avho distinguished 

 himself by the study of the orchids of Bourbon and Madagascar: 

 " It was believed for a long time that the seeds were incapable of the 

 first act of vegetation, and it is only a short time since that Dr. Salis- 

 bury has observed it in England." Dr. Salisbury's discovery seems 

 to have been purely accidental, and when other observers attempted 

 to repeat his experiment they met with complete failure. Neverthe- 

 less, as the nineteenth century went by, examples of germination 

 attributable to chance multiplied, but no one knew of any method 

 tending to reproduce the phenomenon with certainty. However, 

 some keen observer, whose name has remained unknown ^ to science, 

 unless it may be Dominy, who will be mentioned later, noticed that 

 the accidental and infrequent germination took place on the compost 

 surrounding the mother plant or, better still, on the roots which were 

 in the compost but projected more or less completely from it. This 

 observation, the result of a lesson taught by nature, was not lost, 

 and it was thus that the mysterious method of germination upon the 

 base of the mother plant was inaugurated. This strange and unin- 

 telligible technique was not published, so we can not honor its in- 

 ventor. It evidently remained a trade secret which for a very long 



1 There are regions in South America, notably in the district of Pacho, celebrated for 

 the famous Odontoglosisum crispum, where all the Indian population Is employed in 

 hunting for orchids, small villages furnishing hundreds of these hunters. This intense 

 exploitation makes one fear the rapid disappearance of some of the beautiful species. 



"It is certainly Neumann (chef des serres du Museum de Paris) in 1844 and Moore iu 

 Glasnevin (Dublin, Ireland). See Costantin, Les stapes d'une d^couverte biologique. Les 

 hybrides d'OrcliId^es (Revue scientiflque, i>9 fevrier, 1913, 257). 



