206 ORCHIDS OF THE SIKKIM-HIMALAYA. 
to the apex. Column very short and stout. Stigma large, sub-orbicular. Pollinia ovoid, 
attached by a slender caudicle to an orbieular gland. Hook. fiL Fl. Br. Ind. VI, 27; 
Ann. Roy. Bot. Gard., Calcutta, Vol. V, 36, t. 55; Vanda undulata, Lindl. in Journ. 
Linn. Soc. III, 42; Reichb. fil. in Gard. Chron., 1875, I, 202; id. 1878, I, 168. 
Sikkim, at elevations from 5,000 to 7,000 feet; in flower during April and Мау. 
Pantling No. 72. Bhutan, Khasia Hills. 
The sepals and petals are fleshy in texture and white in colour, flushed with 
pink and sometimes tipped with green. The lip is yellowish-green striped with pink. 
The peduncle, the rachis of the raceme, and the young shoots are green, spotted with 
purplish-brown. 
PLATE 275.—Stauropsis undulata, Benth. A plant; of natural sise. Fig. 1 а flower, 2 column with 
anther in situ and stigma, 3 empty anther, under surface, 4 pollinia, front view, 5 the same, back 
view ; all enlarged. 
46. Sarcochilus, Б. Brown. 
Epiphytal Stem none or very short. Leaves narrowly oblong or absent. Fowers 
usually in pendulous racemes. Sepals and petals sub-equal, free, spreading; the dorsal 
sepal concave, the lateral pair broader and partly adnate to the foot of the column. 
Lip jointed or adnate to the long produced foot of the column, without a spur; 
the side lobes very large, erect; the apical lobe minute, tooth-like; the disc with hairy 
ridges and calli... Column thick, shorter than its foot, wingless, rostellum short. Anthor 
terminal, depressed, shortly beaked in front, sometimes bearing two lateral setze. — Pollinia 
four, in pairs, compressed; the caudicle slender, flattened, the gland small. Species 
probably about ten, Indian and Australian. 
The genus Sarcochilus, as reconstituted by Bentham, embraces the Sarcochilus of Robert Brown and 
of so much else besides that it isdiffienlt to know what its limits are. Sir Joseph Hooker, іп his 
Flora of British India, adopts the Benthamian genus, but characterises it as “a polymorphous one, no 
doubt to be dismembered when better known.” And in the Botanical Magazine (sub. t. 7044) he 
remarks as follows:— 
“Sarcochilus, as reconstituted in the ‘Genera Plantarum,’ consists of a very difficult group of 
thirty or forty Indian, Malayan, Australian, and Pacific Island orchids differing greatly in habit, and 
out of which some eight or ten genera” (thirteen are given in the Index Kewensis) “had been 
differentiated.” * * * “For this enlurged genus Reichenbach filius proposed to adopt the name of 
Thrixspermum, Loureiro (1790), as being anterior to Sarcochilus, Brown (1810), a course which Bentham 
did not adopt in the ‘Genera Plantarum, on the very sufficient grounds that the name is utterly 
bad in construction, and because the description of the latter is so incomplete that it would have been 
impossible to recognise the plant. intended by it, but for a scrap contained in Loureiros Herbarium 
preserved in the British Museum. On the other hand, Sarcochilus has been recognised by all authors 
for three-quarters of a century, and many species have been described under that generic name.” 
Of the species described under Sarcochilus in Hooker’s Flora of British India, six are natives of 
Sikkim, viz., (1) S. suaveolens, H. 1.; (2) S. obtusus, Benth. ; (3) S. Manaii, Н. f.; (4) S. hirtus, Benth.; 
(5) 8. Arachnites, Reichb. fil. ; and (6) S. Juniferus, Reichb. Bl. Of these six, the last (S. Juniferus) is 
the only one which has the characters of the genus as we believe Robert Brown ori ginally | constituted 
it, and which occur in the only species which he described, viz. S. falcatus. These characters are the 
presence in the lip of two very large side lobes and of a very short anterior lobe, together with 
hd total absence of a spur. The other five Sikkim species attributed to Sarcochilus in'the Flora of 
British Indis. we have disposed of as follows:—For 8. suaveolens we have revived the genus Ornitha- 
rium which Lindley provided for the plant when it first came under his notice, the very. peculiar. 
