17 
The majority of the Dendrobiums referred to are at home in 
regions where they are subject to an annual period, shorter or 
longer, of drought and have no leaves then. If such plants are 
transported to a moist and evenly warm climate, it often occurs 
that the inflorescences do not develop, or only by way of ex- 
ception, and merely leafshoots are born. An instance of this is 
furnished by D. nobile, which plant grows well at Buitenzorg, 
but only exceptionally, and then only in very dry years, flowers, 
while the stalks are pregnant with root-bearing young plants. 
Some years ago the Buitenzorg Gardens received a collection 
of D. Wardianum of which the leafless stalks were not slow in 
producing shoots from the nodes. In normal circumstances there 
would be born inflorescences, which most probably had already 
been preformed as such; as it was, there did not appear — evi- 
dently owing to the modified conditions — a single inflorescence, 
but on the contrary all sorts of transitions from these to leafy 
shoots. The above information may serve to make some of the 
following deviations better understood. 
Two flowers (some other appeared to have been too much injured 
to allow examination) both show coalescences in the perianth, viz. 
Ist flower: the upper sepal has grown together with the left 
one. The two lateral petals coalesce with the labellum at the 
same time uniting their upper margins. The top of the labellum 
is slanting. 
2nd flower: labellum normal, the other five parts of the perianth 
form one whole which envelopes the labellum like a gutter. 
This gutter ends into two teeth separated by a notch, but each 
of the teeth shows two secondary little excrescences. The sup- 
position that the gutter is composed of 5 parts is corroborated 
by the presence of six vascular bundles in the petiole, although 
the median sepal does not project beyond the notch. 
Dendrobium superbum Rehb. f. 
Habitat Borneo, Manilla and the Moluccas. 
Coll. January 1902. 
Something like the above though not to such a degree was 
observed in D. superbum. 
