2 5 THE ORCHIDS OF NEW ENGLAND. 



this plant in Native Flowers and Ferns, and transfer his inter- 

 esting statement, that while " most of the true Orchises of 

 Europe have a tuberous root in addition to their fibres, our 

 species has fleshy fibres only." 



The few who have found the Showy Orchis in Maine tell me 

 that it does not bloom before June in that State, and even 

 then is preceded by two other Orchids, but May is its time in 

 Massachusetts, and in Connecticut, where it has been gathered 

 as early as May 3d ; and as we rarely fail to get it the third 

 week of the month in Vermont, I think it may rightly be said 

 to open the Orchid season. The Stemless, or Pink Lady's 

 Slipper, Cypripedium acaule (C. kumileoi the old writers) presses 

 it so closely, however, that it is not a matter of wonderment 

 when I secure them both on the same day. The latter, known 

 better, perhaps, as " Moccasin Flower," " Venus' Slipper " — 

 names applied to the other species as well — " Indian Mocca- 

 sin," " Old Goose," " Camel's Foot," " Noah's Ark" (the last 

 two popular names are probably rarely heard out of the Mid- 

 dle States), represents the other extreme of the Orchis family, 

 and Mr. Darwin held, as late as 1877 certainly, when the sec- 

 ond edition of his " Fertilization of Orchids " was published, 

 his original opinion that " the single genus Cypripedium differs 

 from all other Orchids far more than any other two of them do 

 from each other," adding, " an enormous amount of extinction 

 must have swept away a multitude of intermediate forms, and left 

 this genus, now widely distributed, as a record of a former and 

 more simple state of the great Orchidean order." Mr. George 

 Bentham, in a paper read before the Linnaean Society of Lon- 

 don in 1 88 1, took the opposite side, saying: "The importance 

 of the single character (the possession of more than one an- 

 ther) separating the Cypripediae from Orchids generally has 

 fallen so much in estimated value that they have by common 

 consent been reunited with that order as a distinct tribe only." 



"The single anther," says Darwin, " which is present in all 



