24 ORCHID HYBRIDS. 



links between the two are wonderfully easy to trace. 

 And then again such ladles full of molasses of personal 

 flattery as are dished up to us from such striders as 

 Sander & Co., they turn the stomach of any man with 

 an every day constitution. An orchid hybrid is a bas- 

 tard after all, and most of them so far retain the odor 

 of illegitimacy as long as they show a flower to look at. 

 Since the days of Dr. Lindley it is against good taste 

 to attach a deserving collector's name to a decent orchid; 

 that would make a plant unsalable; there would be 

 11 nothing in it." Please, those who are performing the 

 acts of christening these foundlings, do not consider 

 the name of a gallant collector the proper noun to at- 

 tach to a characterless hybrid. To feed them with the 

 swill of obsolete bastards is adding insult to the injury 

 done to most of them every day of their life. Such 

 idiocities as to attach names as Calantha vestita Cornelius 

 Vanderbilt to a hybrid which at best is no vestita, and 

 then, such common rubbish as now these days every 

 fourth-class gardener can raise by the box full," to be be- 

 spoken", that looks to me like jeering at the man whose 

 name has been used, and as an effort to perpetuate the 

 contempt which has been put into such act by the savant. 

 Such footprints in the trail of science lead to the very same 

 road which "The Professor" used to pace, and end in 

 the orchid junk-shop of the "Xenia," the garlic odor 

 of which refutes their xenia character and verifies the 

 expected, when in one number only "three of the four 

 species described must take the ranks of synonyms." 

 Of course personalities of " Sanderianum " and " Wend- 

 landianum" have to pop up from their mixed ranks and 

 remind us of the fact that when people can not gain 

 glory from unlooked-for quarters, they pick the dried up 

 laurels from their spice-chests and decorate each other. 



