24 REPORT ON 



but of course allied, genera, were also operated upon in the same 

 way. Capsules were produced in abundance, which in due course 

 proved their maturity by dehiscing, and thus the long and 

 anxiously desired seed was at length at hand. Then arose a great 

 difficulty, a difficulty which still exists, and which our long 

 experience has enabled us to make only a short step towards over- 

 coming, to discover the most suitable method of raising seedlings. 

 The seeds of Orchids are minute chafty bodies of extreme light- 

 ness. So minute are they that an ordinary pocket lens is power- 

 less to enable one to know whether the seeds are likely to contain 

 a germ or are mere lifeless dust. When growing wild, it is evident 

 that the contents of the mature capsules after dehiscence are 

 more or less scattered by the wind, perhaps wafted to great dis- 

 tances, until they settle on the branches of trees, on shelving 

 rocks or other suitable situations where the seeds can germinate, 

 and the seedlings firmly affix themselves. Following, or at least 

 believing that we were following Nature, so far as the altered 

 circumstances of artificial cultivation allowed, every method or 

 available means that could be thought of was brought into 

 request to secure the germination of the seed. It was sown upon 

 blocks of wood, pieces of tree-fern stems, strips of cork, upon the 

 moss that surfaced the pots of the growing plants, in fact, in any 

 situation that seemed to promise favourable results. But as it 

 was in the early days of Orchid hybridisation, so it is now, we 

 seem as far off as ever from, hitting upon a method by which at 

 least a moderate amount of success may be calculated upon ; 

 failures were at first, as now, innumerable, and numberless such 

 are without doubt inevitable. Among the most cogent causes of 

 failure in the raising of seedling Orchids, there can be no doubt 

 that the altered conditions of climate, especially the deficiency of 

 sunlight, and the artificial treatment to which the plants are 

 necessarily subject in the glass houses of Europe, are the greatest. 

 The capsules neither can nor do attain the perfection natural 

 to them in their native countries, and it is more than probable 

 that, independently of the capsules grown in our houses being 

 the production of cross-breeding, they do not yield a fractional 

 part of the quantity of good seed they would do in their native 

 land. And so with their progeny the tender seedlings are 

 brought into life under circumstances so different from what they 

 would have been in their native land, that it is not at all surpris- 

 ing that multitudes of them perish in their earliest infancy. The 



