Yellow and Orange 



lifts a spire of inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers, more attrac- 

 tive to the eye of the structural botanist than to the aesthete. It 

 blooms in moist places, as most orchids do, since water with 

 which to manufacture nectar enough to fill their deep spurs is a 

 prime necessity. Orchids have arrived at that pinnacle of achieve- 

 ment that it is impossible for them to fertilize themselves. More 

 than that, some are absolutely sterile to their own pollen when it 

 is applied to their stigmas artificially ! With insect aid, however, 

 a single plant has produced over 1,000,700 seeds. No wonder, 

 then, that, as a family, they have adopted the most marvellous 

 blandishments and mechanism in the whole floral kingdom to se- 

 cure the visits of that special insect to which each is adapted, and, 

 having secured him, to compel him unwittingly to do their bid- 

 ding. In the steaming tropical jungles, where vegetation is luxu- 

 riant to the point of suffocation, and where insect life swarms in 

 myriads undreamed of here, we can see the best of reasons for 

 orchids mounting into trees and living on air to escape strangula- 

 tion on the ground, and for donning larger and more gorgeous 

 apparel to attract attention in the fierce competition for insect 

 trade waged about them. Here, where the struggle for survival is 

 incomparably easier, we have terrestrial orchids, small, and quietly 

 clad, for the most part. 



Having the gorgeous, exotic air plants of the hothouse in mind, 

 this little tubercled orchis seems a very poor relation indeed. In 

 June and July, about a week before the ragged orchis comes out, 

 we may look for this small, fringeless sister. Its clasping leaves, 

 which decrease in size as they ascend the stem (not to shut 

 off the light and rain from the lower ones), are parallel-veined, 

 elliptic, or, the higher ones, lance-shaped. A prominent tubercle, 

 or palate, growing upward from the lip, almost conceals the en- 

 trance to the nectary, and makes a side approach necessary. Why ? 

 Usually an insect has free, straight access down the centre of a 

 flower's throat, but here he cannot have it. A slender tongue 

 must be directed obliquely from above into the spur, and it will 

 enter the discal groove as a thread enters the eye of a needle. By 

 this arrangement the tongue must certainly come in contact with 

 one of the sticky discs to which an elongated pollen gland is at- 

 tached. The cement on the disc hardening even while the visitor 

 sucks, the pollen gland is therefore drawn out, because firmly 

 attached to his tongue. At first the pollen mass stands erect on 

 the proboscis ; but in the fraction of a moment which it takes a 

 butterfly to flit to another blossom, it has bent forward auto- 

 matically into the exact position required for it to come in contact 

 with the sticky stigma of the next tubercled orchis entered, where 

 it will be broken off. Now we understand the use of the palate. 

 Butterfly collectors often take specimens with remnants of these 

 pollen stumps stuck to their tongues. In his classical work "On 

 the Fertilization of Orchids by Insects," Darwin tells of finding 



288 



